EIGHTEEN

EVERY INCH OF my skin flushed with memory as soon as I opened my eyes the following morning. I screwed them shut again, trying to deny what I’d done. But the memories rose up inside me – and Amalia lay warm and drowsy beside me.

Careful not to wake her with my shivers, I sat up and pulled on the nearest scrap of clothing I could find, a muslin shift so thin it was nigh transparent. I’d barely yanked it over my head when the latch of the bedroom door rattled, freezing me into a wary stillness.

Amalia stirred, but didn’t wake as Renatas stepped into the room, nursing a ferret kit in his arms.

Fear hammering spikes through my veins, I glanced from him to Amalia, certain she would wake up and discover him. Gesturing urgently for quiet, I slipped from the bed and fumbled for my veil.

Lonely people make easy marks, Grandmother harped. I had no time for her now.

‘Renatas!’ I hissed, tiptoeing closer. ‘What are you doing here? What’s happened?’

Dark circles haunted his eyes, but his attitude was calm. ‘I am tired of waiting,’ he said, meeting my gaze with a challenging stare and making no attempt to keep his voice down.

From the bed Amalia mumbled in her sleep. I gestured for him to precede me into the sitting room, but he ignored me.

‘I know it’s hard to understand, Renatas, but it’s important –’

He cut me off. ‘No. You don’t understand. I have no interest in living in this stone hovel any longer than I must. It’s clear who holds the power – and it isn’t you. So I don’t need your help.’

Behind him, Dieter appeared in the doorway, a mocking light in his eyes. He laid a hand on Renatas’s shoulder. ‘I told you I’d find him, Matte.’

Taking in my state of undress, he paused, his gaze flicking to the bed, where Amalia’s bare leg protruded from beneath the coverlet. All amusement faded from his eyes then, replaced by a hard, flat stare. Stalking to the bedside, he yanked back the covers, revealing his sister’s naked sprawling figure.

Amalia awoke with a yelp. The sight of Dieter looming above her brought a second cry, before she recovered her customary attitude. ‘Do you mind! It’s cold, and it’s still dark!’ she protested, clawing for the blankets.

‘Interesting tactic,’ said Dieter, refusing to release the blanket to her.

Amalia shrugged and, admitting defeat, looked around for clothing. ‘We had a bet, right? I told you I’d find him first.’ Then her eyes lit on Renatas and she scowled, cross at losing.

‘This isn’t a game, Mali,’ he snapped, yanking her upright by an elbow. ‘They hang adulterers in these parts. How could you be so stupid?’ he continued, throwing a gown at her.

‘Well, I’m not married, so I guess I’m safe from the noose,’ she said glibly. ‘And in any case who said anything about adultery?’

Dieter glowered at her, stealing some of the starch from her spine.

‘Please. I’m the Duethin’s sister and she’s your wife,’ she said, though her bravado was shakier now, and her hands were clumsy and slow as she pulled on the gown. ‘Who’d risk angering you?’

‘Right now, Mali, I wouldn’t count on me for protection.’

‘It’s a good thing nobody else knows about it, then.’

Dieter didn’t answer, but his grim stare said it all.

Panicked, I snuck a look at Renatas. The ferret kit had crawled halfway up his chest and was nosing at his ear but he was oblivious to it, watching the scene unfold with avid curiosity.

Amalia flung a sullen glance my way, cowed at last. ‘I don’t see why you’re not shouting at her as well.’

The focus of attention again, I grabbed the first gown I could find and thrashed into it like a woman drowning. It was Amalia’s.

Decently covered, I still couldn’t look either of them in the eye, so I lifted my chin and stared behind them. An all-too-familiar prickle touched my nape and brought a sting of sweat to my palms.

Quickly I measured my options. Dieter and Amalia were between me and any exit, unless I retreated to the bed. But that wouldn’t hide me, or stop the questions. I had to keep standing, and hope I had time before the vision claimed me. To conceal the tremble in my hands, I busied them with lacing the sleeves about my wrists.

It was then that it took me.

Renatas faded to white, as thin and stark as bones beneath a winter sky. Dieter’s hand still rested on his shoulder, but it was a hand grown wasted and hard, and his clothes had turned to leather and armour, draped about in wisps of shroud-like cloth. Small snakes wreathed the both of them, fangs bared and biting at their tender flesh, opening wounds which dripped slow red blood. Neither flinched.

As always, the vision vanished suddenly. I came to on my knees, one hand flung out before me as if to ward off what I’d seen. Gradually Dieter, Amalia and Renatas, normal and fully fleshed, swam back into focus.

‘Well, now,’ said Dieter, calculations running swift behind his pale eyes. ‘This is interesting.’

Swallowing against my queasiness, I pressed my hands to my stomach and closed my eyes. The vision had left me pale and shaking, as they always did.

‘I feel sick,’ I said.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Dieter. ‘I remember hearing about your … shadow sickness.’

‘If you were ill, I wouldn’t mock you,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you’d gloat.’

I bit my cheek against the urge to respond.

‘You’re not going to throw up on the carpets, are you?’ said Amalia.

‘You are a woman of strange sensibilities, Mali,’ said Dieter. ‘You’ll knife her for gaining me allies, and you’ll …’ – he cut himself short with a glance at Renatas, although coyness now seemed ridiculous – ‘… persuade her by a means which could see you both hanged. Yet a little vomit turns you squeamish.’

‘Mock away,’ said Amalia. ‘You won’t have to sleep in the smell of it.’

‘See to the boy, then, unless you’d rather tend to Matilde?’ he said, which had her snatching at Renatas’s elbow and hurrying him from the room.

‘What will you do with him?’ I asked, my heart in my throat.

‘Are you planning on standing?’ Dieter replied. ‘I hope you don’t want me to kneel. It doesn’t look comfortable.’

‘Don’t be cruel.’

‘If you were truly sick, I assure you I’d be the soul of solicitousness,’ he said and held out a hand.

Reluctantly, I let him help me up and lead me to the couch in the sitting room.

‘Pretty strange fit,’ he said, pouring me a drink of ale and handing me the wooden cup with care. ‘Quite short,’ Dieter continued. ‘And lacking in the actual fit.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I wanted to stand, but he pulled a footstool in front of me and perched on it, blocking me in.

‘Tell me, Matte, what did you see?’

I clutched the cup in both hands. ‘A frightened little boy. Whom you promised not to kill. Will you honour it?’

‘Ah, but it was you who broke the bargain, Matte.’

The truth of it made me tremble. I had gambled, and lost. Would Renatas pay the price?

‘And it appears the boy’s location wasn’t your only secret. No, you also had the secret behind your rumoured shadow sickness. I must confess, I’d always wondered why your grandmother let you live if you were prone to such a weakness as fits. I thought her soft-hearted for it.’

He paused, eyeing my rising flush of anger, as if to give me time to speak. I gritted my teeth, refusing to give him the satisfaction.

He shrugged. ‘When I met you, I revised my opinion. Obviously you weren’t entirely without strength. After all, you, alone of all your kin, had crawled out of the carnage. And then you’d had the gall to march up to my men and pretend we were allied, the blood of your court still on your clothes and in your hair! It was impressive, Matte. Bold.’

I wished a real fit would seize me and paralyse my mind, leaving me frothing and insensate.

‘I had no other choice,’ I hissed.

‘Well, you could have fought back in the sanctuary. Although you would have died, of course.’ He leant closer, his eyes alight. ‘And you couldn’t die, could you, Matte? Because you’d already seen that you didn’t.’

I leant back into the couch, shaking my head.

‘It wasn’t simply canniness saved you, was it?’

‘Leave me alone,’ I whispered.

‘You saw the invasion. You saw how to survive,’ he persisted.

‘I saw my shroud!’ I cried.

Silence followed as I stared at him, trembling.

He smiled, a slow bloom of triumph. ‘So you did foresee the attack.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘The results of it. Fire, death all around. And me, walking dead among the dead.’ The impossibility of that outcome still left me cold with fear, and acutely conscious of the brand I bore.

‘Good,’ said Dieter.

‘Good?’

‘I liked our first meeting,’ he said with unabashed cheer. ‘I liked you, bold and brazen. I’m glad it wasn’t the false courage of foreknowledge.’

A tiny spark of pride lit the hollows of my heart, making me despair at what I’d become. What sort of sick and twisted creature was I, to be jealous of the good opinion of a man I … I wanted to say I hated, but how could I claim that, even to myself, when I wanted him to think well of me?

Dieter leant closer still. ‘So, Matte, tell me, what did you see?’

‘Nothing,’ I insisted, my hands fluttering up between us as if to ward off his persistence.

He caught them in his own, stilling them. ‘The boy, Matilde, you saw something for the boy.’

I shook my head.

He gripped my hands tighter, pressing me into the back of the couch and moving so close that he filled my vision and I couldn’t look away.

‘Tell me what you saw for the boy.’

‘Bones,’ I intoned, the intensity of his gaze drawing the words out of me in a whisper.

I felt like I had on our binding night, when I’d knelt down before him, frightened and alone, and he’d daubed my head, marking and claiming me more intimately than any mere binding.

‘He was bones beneath the winter sky. You were draped in snakes, as was he. Tiny little snakes with red fangs.’

He digested this in silence, staring through me with an abstracted look. I shifted, trying to ease the pressure of his hold.

‘And the meaning – does the lad die? Do others die because of him?’

I frowned, shook my head, shrugged. ‘Neither, for certain.’

He cocked his head to one side. ‘Is it possible you’ve never learnt to interpret your visions?’

‘You’re the one who dabbles in the arcana, not me,’ I retorted.

He drew back. ‘Your mother obviously had something of the wild knowledge in her blood, to pass it on to you. And your father’s mother let another woman pour memories into her head. And yet still you sneer? You Svanatens truly are a priggish lot.’

Again his stare turned distant. ‘Snakes, you say? How many? How large?’

‘Hundreds. And tiny.’

He gave me a calculating smile. ‘What a valuable wife I have.’