SIXTEEN
YET AGAIN, I woke to anxiety.
Today we were to journey home. Bitter as the truth was, I feared it, dreading also the gadderen which would shortly follow. Time was short, and my resources were sparse.
Nothing in the journey allayed my fears. Dieter’s men constantly blocked my Skythe escort from me. The Skythes, however, seemed neither perturbed nor frustrated by it. It wasn’t long before they grew accustomed to the arrangement and stopped trying to jockey closer. Each night brought revelry – food and drink flowing around the campfires, Turasi and Skythe voices racketing across the land long into the night.
Roshi showed little inclination for my company, preferring the midnight festivities to our tent. Amalia had clearly been instructed to let me be, and she and I settled into a routine of ignoring each other.
I had never felt so alone.
On the third day we rode further south than necessary, stopping when the wooden walls of a holding greeted us. I sat clenched so tight in the saddle my horse skittered beneath me, sawing at the reins. Janek, the thane of this holding, had long been loyal to House Svanaten, but the ease with which Dieter sat his horse, and the smiling arrival of Janek, told me his loyalty had shifted.
Janek bowed to Dieter as he dismounted, then cast me a nervous glance.
Mindful of the lesson I’d learnt when I tried to reveal Dieter’s arcana to the Skythes, and weary of games I couldn’t win, I kept my mouth shut and ignored Janek’s welcoming patter. The temptation was strong, however. If I could only reveal Dieter’s use of the shadows, Janek’s loyalty would flip faster than a jackknifing hare.
First I had to free myself of the hex which bound my tongue.
As Dieter’s soldiers dismounted, they resolved into two distinct groups. The smaller group were clearly guests. They waited, reins in hand, to be informed of their billet.
The larger group tied their mounts to hitching rails with the ease of homecoming before greeting the women and children who rushed towards them.
‘It’s fortunate you won me the Skythes as allies,’ murmured Dieter, taking my elbow and smiling down at me. ‘Now I can release these men back to their homes for a spell. Between you and me, they were getting a touch fractious.’
My answering smile was a sickly, pale creature with roots reaching all the way down to my tight-knotted stomach. We continued on, Janek still babbling away, this time about the meal he’d prepared. ‘You’ll find some of the sauces familiar,’ he said, turning to me with an ingratiating smile, ‘since the Turholm’s chief cook is the daughter of one of my thralls.’
‘You mean Leise?’ I asked.
He nodded. What was it Leise had said? My family were wiped out by your mother’s people. Do you see me wailing over it?
‘I know that look, Matte,’ Dieter said. ‘You’re puzzling again. What is it this time? You always notice meaning in such small details.’
‘Sometimes, Dieter, I think you’re the only totally honest person I know,’ I said.
Surprise wiped the humour from his face. ‘That could almost be a compliment.’
‘Let’s just say I’m reassessing the value of frankness,’ I said.
Dieter laughed. It wasn’t his usual mocking tone but a clean, hearty sound.
With Dieter on one side and Amalia on the other, I sat down at the table of a man who’d pledged loyalty to my House yet given aid to overthrow it. The thought was enough to make my head spin and I sprang back up, the legs of my chair scraping on the stone floor. Conversation stilled as faces turned my way, though Amalia kept her nose buried in her cup.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ I said, a quaver in my voice. ‘I need fresh air.’
‘Of course,’ said Dieter and summoned Mathis and Gunther to escort me.
Once out of the room I picked up my skirts and ran back through the corridors until I burst out into the courtyard. Twilight had turned it into a place of purple shadows and secret breezes. Despite the breadth of space, it seemed too narrow, closing in on me until I couldn’t draw breath.
Seek the high places, Shadi had said.
My eyes snagged on a watchtower in the centre of the western wall. Squat and blocky, it was still the highest structure in the holding. A plain, iron-bound oak door opened into the tower’s base, stairs looming dark behind it. They stretched endlessly ahead of me, winding up and around, step after step, so that climbing them was like a mantra, lulling me into a daze. But when I reached the top and crept out onto the turret beneath the open sky, a brisk wind slapped my face, waking me with a start.
It was then that I glimpsed Roshi, perched in an embrasure as if falling couldn’t hurt, leaning out over the depths like some awkward, wingless heron.
Mathis and Gunther ground to a halt behind me. I made a gesture of dismissal and they retreated back into the shelter of the stairway. After all, I couldn’t escape, and Roshi they judged no threat either, since my mother’s people had clearly shown their preference for Dieter.
Stepping up to the battlements, I rested my palms on the cool, gritty stone. Below and behind me lay the sprawling, random slopes of the holding’s roofs. In front of me, sharply demarcated by the thick battlement wall, the silent plains stretched into the darkness. Janek’s farmers must have had permission to pasture their herds on those grounds, for more than a single flock of sheep milled around the tower’s base.
I pulled the collar of my gown tighter, and looked up at the sky until the sensation of swaying threatened to topple me; only my palms on the wall keeping me steady. Roshi didn’t turn or speak, and silence stretched between us.
The stars had started coming out when Roshi finally said, ‘You do not like your husband?’
For some reason, I remembered the intensity of his gaze and the softness of his callused touch as he’d scrutinised my wounded throat. His reason for wanting me alive: simple prudence.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t like him.’
‘I respect his power,’ I said, touching the scab on my throat, still raw and prone to cracking if I turned my head too sharply. ‘Why does it matter?’
‘A woman should like her husband.’
‘Whether or not you understand my reasons has no bearing on their validity.’
‘True. He is your husband; yours is the opinion which matters,’ she said, speaking as if she had come to some decision.
I didn’t probe. All I needed to know was where her loyalty lay, and time would reveal that more truly than any words spoken now. Meanwhile, I had more pressing concerns. Unseen beyond the dark horizon, the drightens would be moving, converging on the Turholm. The gadderen – which would confirm or deny Dieter as Duethin – was imminent.
Dieter still held my throne. With the Skythes by his side, his hold was now stronger than ever. And if he’d turned Janek, one of Beata’s most loyal thanes, he could turn anyone.
It was past time the power shifted back in my favour, but first I needed to rid myself of Dieter’s hex, and for that I needed knowledge.
‘Roshi, the spell Shadi worked on my father’s mother – do all your people know such workings?’
‘Only those with the gift for it study the shadows,’ she replied. ‘Some glamours can be worked without the gift, and most all of us know a couple of those.’
A gift! If I had my say in the matter I’d want nothing to do with spells and hexes; I’d give back every vision that had ever plagued me, every foretelling which had threatened to see me locked into a cloister, my life given over to scrying for the church. I’d live simple and untouched by the strange foretellings which came in the middle of the night, through the touch of wood or cloth, riding on the tails of the summer winds.
‘Do you have it, this … gift?’ I asked, desperate for the answer to be yes.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you?’
‘No.’ I didn’t hesitate – Grandmother had beaten that response out of me long ago. Hesitate, pause, show any crack in the façade and I would be shut up in a cloister, and with my freedom lost, so too would House Svanaten be lost.
I fixed my eyes on the horizon and curled my fingers over the edge of the wall. ‘If I wanted to reverse a hex, would you know what I’d need?’
Roshi frowned. ‘One of my people’s spells?’
I hesitated, fearful of the consequences should this conversation make its way back to Dieter.
What of it? Grandmother demanded. The man holds all the cards. It will make him overconfident.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I believe it’s from the Amaer.’ The word sat oddly on my tongue, unpractised and halting.
Roshi gave me a blank look. ‘Where do they roam?’
‘South,’ I said, my heart squeezing into a tight, hot ball of bitter disappointment. ‘A long way south, apparently.’
‘I’ve never heard of them. Is it … is it a simple spell, this one you want reversed?’
‘No,’ I said, almost choking on the word.
If I stayed, I’d begin babbling. I could already feel inappropriate words fighting their way up my throat.
Muttering goodnight, I fled.