Chapter The Third
Salt clung to the coast like a lifeline. It ghosted in squalls across the wavering edge of the water, through the weed-tough dunegrass cluttering the stone walls which marked out the edge of what amounted to civilisation on this island, and stained the skin like sunlight. People raised away from the sea did not understand how haunted the seaside could be: everything here had once been something else. This beach had once been aragonite, and coral, and selenite, and shellfish, which meant that this beach had once lived and breathed and crept about. This water had kissed this land and lands very far away as well. A skeletal boat lay at the edge of the littoral zone, half-drowned in sand.
The Third Land was unique in that sense: it was a fragmented territory, scattered across four-dozen small islands nestled in the shadow of the kingdom. Some of these rocks had no more population than a half-herd of sheep, hardy from hunger; other isles had formed their own tiny fiefdoms, two or three towns apiece, from which they would reap whatever was due to the Third Lord and take whatever was left for their own wiry existences. Other Lands were larger, other Lands were richer, but the Third was uniquely disassembled and in that disassembly swelled a strange kind of wealth.
For example: as they walked around the edge of Listis Island, from the lonely cove upon which they had landed to the town at the heart of the atoll, it was clear to Bahram the Third that they were imposing upon some kind of celebration. He could not name the purpose for which they danced on the shore – they were wearing green, so perhaps it was a farewell to summer – but it was enough for him to silence his companions and gesture that they should approach no further for the moment.
There was little Bahram Jahandar respected more than a party in full swing.
Flavius could have told anyone that; it was all well and good for Bahram to pause upon the dunes, and stare wistfully across the sands to the tight circle of dancing women which had spun to encircle the sparring men in the centre of the beach. The apprentice was the one lugging all of the swords, wrapped tightly in burlap and jute to keep the damp and salt from spoiling them. His hands were riddled with blisters that would become calluses and with wounds that would become scars, and now he was doing all he could do to keep upright, swords-and-all.
No harm to him, Bahram thought; it would put muscle on him. The adolescent was in dire need of brawn if he was to continue smithing. Next to tall, broad, Keyvan, Flavius seemed a twig, though he had the corded forearms of one who has spent a childhood rowing the choppy waters of the Third Bay. He had grown up on an island near to this one; Bahram wondered whether this festival was something familiar to him.
But Flavius said that it was not. "A name day?" he offered dubiously, as they watched the line of dancers break as a few of the women were forced to scatter by a spar that had spiralled out of control – they were grappling in the sand now, throwing up dirt, clawing at one another's eyes. Bahram thought that he had identified the winner, but the sealine made for uneven footing and misfortune was usually the most persuasive factor in such a bout.
Keyvan, who had always considered himself very sophisticated for having been raised in a lighthouse rather than out in the archipelago, said, "they don't celebrate name days on Listis."
A waste, Bahram thought, of a good excuse for festivity.
He said, "let's go down and see what the fun is about."
He slung his sword over his shoulder and set the pace. Flavius scrambled after him, sure-footed as a mountain goat, keeling to one side under the weight of his cargo like a one-oared rowboat. Gods, but he would be wasted as a smith. After all these months in the forge, he was still built like a sailor: short and lean and wiry, not an ounce of fat between neck and knee, skin stretched tightly over a growing frame. Still, Bahram reasoned, Keyvan had looked similarly as a youth. At a full six inches taller, Bahram had been no giant himself. The navy had been good to them, had made them tall; the army had been better to them, and made them broad. Keyvan had kept that broadness, while a few years at the anvil had softened Bahram's edges.
An anvil and a woman. The ruin of many a chevalier.
They needn't have worried: as they drifted closer, buoyed forward on the gusting zephyr of salt-wind which bounced off the shore, faces turned towards them and voices raised in recognition. As they drew closer to the dancing ground, two of the spectators split away to come and greet them, not looking entirely unappreciative. Fresh dancers, they might have been thinking; untried fighters, they might have thought.
Or perhaps it was this simple: new swords.
Keyvan raised a hand and called a greeting: "What's afoot?"
"You've come far," said the youth. Despite the simplicity of their words, they were beaming; they seemed practically abuzz with delight at some matter which lay beyond Bahram's knowledge. They could not be much older than his little niece, Myrhine, and wore their hair just as Myrhine wore it: soft clouds of inky black hair around her shoulders, so that in this low noon-time light it resembled nothing less than a halo. The resemblance had not been lost on Flavius either: he seemed utterly smitten. Fickle, Bahram thought derisively, there was nothing less honourable than fickleness in one's heart. "In this weather."
"It wasn't so troublesome," Bahram said. "We welcomed the air."
Flavius made a disbelieving sound. The winds had driven them towards the rocks; it had been only brute strength and bravery which had brought them safe upon dry rock. Fortunately, Bahram had more than enough of both and either.
Keyvan made the introductions:
Euphrasia, Flavius.
Flavius, Jene.
Jene, Bahram.
Chevalier, Hauld.
The hauld of this island was a middle-aged woman with two salt-and-pepper braids that she wore to her waist, each bound at their tail with a glimmering silver ring upon which had been engraved the sigil of Bahram's father: a devastatingly simple triangle, through which a line had been driven to form a strange, spiky horizon. Despite its plainness, Bahram Ramin Jahandar II had chosen his cypher with great thought, and his son now wore it on his collarbone for the vow he had taken, just above the curved mark made for the wife he had given to the water.
Tha hauld said, "we are celebrating the end of a dynasty."
The son of the Third Lord said, "there has been no end."
It sounded like a lie, even as he said it, so sure were the old woman's eyes.
She said, "there will be. Your sister will see to that."
And that sounded like a threat, even as she said it, with the way she smiled.
Bahram said, "Amestris will not go to the Selection."
"She is our scion," said little Jene. "Isn't she?"
"And you," the hauld said, "her chevalier."
"I am a swordsmith," he said, and saw their faces fall.
There was no point discussing it. The First House – Morghon and his scummy ilk – would never hold a Selection. Whatever they professed now would be a trick of some sort. Some excuse for the Hound to gut the Third Land as he had scourged Fifth, to burn and to reave and to slaughter. In the end, always slaughter with those people.
They had taken the throne from the Third House when it had been Third's by right and by Selection, and Three would never forget it. Oh, they might feign ignorance; they might look away and smile when the matter was raised; they might profess the matter forgiven, confined to history, water under the proverbial bridge. But as Adrina would have put it, if her lungs were not so full of water: the people of the islands rarely built bridges.
Hauld Euphrasia said, "Humility does not beget our chevalier."
Flavius had set the swords between them; they spilled across the coarse sand, looking somehow blunter in the dull grey light coming off the sea than they had seemed in Bahram's forge.
Bahram said, smilingly, "come. It is not humility which makes me speak so, but bitter experience. After one hundred years of hope, one learns to temper expectations."
One could not leave the sword forever in the forge; eventually, one had to hammer it into shape.
The older woman had smiled slightly. "Experience, chevalier?"
"Did I err, hauld?"
"You are a sailor who has never left the bay," Euphrasia said. There was no malice in her tone; she was expressing her opinions with a refreshing frankness. It was the spoken equivalent of seaspsray. "A swordsmith who has never taken a head, a warrior who has never gone to war."
"Peace," Keyvan said, conciliatory. Bahram was glad for him. "Has been good to us."
"An imposed peace is worse than war."
"We'll disagree." Bahram could command silence when he wished it; his voice could carry an understated power, when he desired that. It was a voice that had hewed a myriad foemen in its own time. "And remain friends."
The hauld said, still with that strange smile, "and we will continue to celebrate."
"Would three more dancers go astray?"
"Dancers, chevalier? Did a coward take our oath?"
"Not at all," Bahram said. She needed only to see the place over his heart, where eight diamonds shone black from his dark skin. "But if you are right about a Selection, then I ought not waste my strength."
"And if you are right?"
"The odds are very low, hauld."
He offered his arm. Euphrasia did not hesitate, but took it immediately, and led the mainlanders to the dance, all argument forgotten. And just like that: a bridge built, despite the dead woman's doubt.
"They have sent a chevalier to do a butcher's work," said the necromancer. He still had his hair. That was unusual in a sorcerer who had lived so long. He ought to have shorn his hair long ago. Ezust had done him that favour now, and bloodied his hands as he did it. "They have sent a princeling where they should have sent a man."
Ezust said, "his tongue as well, chevalier, while you're at it."
Dear Santora, saintly Santora, held her dagger in what was known as the vagrant's grip: two fingers wrapped around the hilt very close to the quillon and the blade lying flat against her wrist, pressing so tightly into her skin that its surface seemed to pulse with her heartbeat. It was a grip from which the knife only ever seemed to arc and swing, more like a scythe than a dagger.
It arced now; it swung.
Ezust left her to the work, and stepped over shattered bones out into shattered light. The day was still young, and in the damp grass below the hillock on which this necromancer had built his mortuary, the scion of the First House could see the faint traces of the traveller who had preceded them. His route should not have carried him into Seven; his route should have carried him straight through the heart of First, and into the waiting blades of the prince's men.
Had the Sixth Chevalier sensed what bloody fate lay ahead of him, or had his diversion been mere serendipity? Perhaps it had been something above, rather than behind, which had driven him into the territory of the dread brotherhood. It mattered little. The day had smiled upon them; their hunt had delivered unto them another quarry, a finer prey. Necromancers almost counted for more than one death, really, when you thought about it. If you thought about it.
This close to the border, all of the houses still looked like they belonged to the First Land: squat and low, as stone-faced as Santora, with slate roofs and doors overhung with crawling ivy. This close to the border, he might still pretend that he was in his homelands, but for the bite in the air. This close to the border, land rose little, and every ascent gave way to a glorious descent: undulating green hills aspeckle with fresh bloom, and a cornflower sky set behind it, clean and clear and swept free of grey blemish. It was the kind of canvas in which the dragonhide would revel. This close to the water – this close to the rock – and this close to the border, it would not do to stay too long beneath such a clear sky.
This close to the border, Ezust was mindful to turn, and say to his bloodied second, "Chevalier, make sure you throw him back into First when you are finished."
She did not need telling. They needed a pretence, though doubtless Syýa would see through it. Morghon certainly would. He would feign disapproval, though Ezust wished he wouldn't. What was the purpose in pretending that this was not – had not been, from the very start – the king's intent?
This was, as far as the Selection was concerned, fair play.
