Chapter the Tenth
When you wake, it is to a boot on your neck, bearing down.
For a split second, you have sense enough to fear your own scion – to know that this is the betrayal that was due, in a righteous world, the betrayal that you have coming for you. It is only a second, indeed, before the whole world lights up an incandescent blue and you realize that she has not forsaken you. Perhaps she ought. After all, you are only half a person: a shadow persisting in a world full of so much lovely azure light.
They had slept in the open: Ewythr had promised much and delivered less, so that they were still many miles from the capital when dusk fell and they were forced into a kind of stasis. The thralls and slaves had decamped from the carts to sleep beneath a thicket of trees, the Paper City lurking underneath the fog in the valley beneath like a predator-thing, and Nimue and Maddoc had joined them at a distance. She had left to him her tywyllgoch, in case he wanted to use the red veil hide his hood: she had others with her, lighter and less distinctive, but eschewed them for the time being. She had hidden her flint ring and did not much see the point of marking herself out so clearly as Second while they were travelling. She and Maddoc had found a spot a little way from the others, closest to where the addaxes were grazing. Her chevalier companion had seemed almost fascinated by the delicate animals and their corkscrew horns and their big brown eyes – as Nimue searched for a good spot on which to rest the night, Maddoc crouched at the edge of the makeshift paddock and stared at them, rapt. The poor animals were driven forward by the sharp prods the merchants carried with them, several metres long and sharp-pointed, so that their hindquarters and flanks bore the long red reminders of their journey north.
He had been so taken with them that it had not even been in question that he might take the first watch: he had stayed where he was as Nimue pulled the blanket about her shoulders and huddled down against the soil, feeling the tiny pebbles rest against her face, cool and insistent. She did not sleep, but listening to the soft breathing of the slaves and slavers around her as the night passed by, Maddoc was quite silent: she had not known a man could stay as still as this, but the hours passed and he remained beautifully so.
She had risen when she had tired of pretending to sleep; Maddoc had taken her place and, although she knew that he too was feigning rest at first, after a moment or three his breathing had deepened and softened and Nimue had been left alone in the night.
She hadn't minded so much. It was good to get some time to breath, to let the cool air wash over her skin, to bathe in the freshness of the Crown Lands. They were close enough to the border that the soil was still slightly warmer underfoot than elsewhere, but they had long ago left the ashes and sand of her homeland behind. She put her hand through clumps of soil, and let them spill back through her fingers, clay staining her nails like viscera.
There was a rustle nearby. Nimue's hand had curled into her pocket and her finger had brushed her ring and before she could slip it on, the stranger had rounded the tree and startled to see Nimue sitting so rigidly upwards, legs folded beneath her. It was the thrall who had stumbled into Nimue earlier, the fine-featured girl with the big brown eyes and matted brown hair, and she was alone. The manacle clasped around her right wrist was mercury-silver, shiny and new, so that it looked more a bracelet than a cuff.
The girl said, "I'm sorry. I hope I didn't wake you."
Nimue shook her head, and kept her voice husky for fear of waking Maddoc. "Not at all."
"Is your friend alright?"
"Tired," Nimue said, "only tired."
The girl was clearly brimming with curiosity, but just nodded, and walked onwards, ducking around the side of the carts which had brought them here. When Nimue glanced back the way she had come, she saw another of the thralls standing beneath the tree, staring after the girl with an expression close to mutinous. The manacle around her left arm was a dull colour, somewhere between brown and black.
Nimue kept her fingers twined about her ring, but the thrall had caught her looking; she retreated back towards the sleeping area quickly. Nimue watched her go, and wondered whether the girl in silver knew that one of her companions so fervently wished her dead. There was a hollow look in the eyes of that thrall that put Nimue on edge, so clearly did it bode carnage; she rose, and moved a little further from Maddoc, so that she could keep her in her eyeline as the thrall went back to her place among the slaves and lay back down on the ground.
The Selection had so utterly occupied her mind that Nimue had quite forgotten about the myriad other dangers the road might throw up to greet them.
The graze of the girl's fingers along her shoulders would have made another jump in her skin: Nimue held firm, though the forced familiarity rather galled.
"It's alright," whispered the girl with the silver manacle. Her voice ghosted along, high and sugary. "It's alright, she's always like this."
"Troubling," said Nimue.
The girl shrugged. "A little," she said.
Yes – Nimue supposed one didn't get much of a say in companions in this place. It was, then, like the Selection in that regard.
The girl said, "do you know for where you are bound?"
"Courtly service," Nimue said curtly, which was true enough. "And you?"
"Something similar." The girl smiled blithely; there was a meaning behind it that Nimue could not read. "I was in service to the Seventh House. They have referred me on."
"Congratulations," Nimue said dryly.
"And to you."
She smiled. Nimue wondered how long it would be before the thrall's blade found purchase in that lovely smile of hers.
The girl's shoe twisted in the soil. She was wearing clothes most unsuited to the cold air: a saree draped about her shoulders, the camisole beneath clinging to her body and stained with soil; her shoes were thin leather, more like court flats than the boots Nimue and Maddoc had both donned for their journey. On this night, when the sky drew down with the promise of a thunderstorm and the wind moved chill across the valley like a cargo, Nimue found herself unsurprised to see that the girl's face was drawn, and uncertain, and paler than it ought to be.
She was a most unimpressive looking thing, which is what made it all the more unnerving when she paused, and looked at Nimue and said, very softly, very intently, "Lady vch Tudwr, the Selection will not begin until we all assemble together. It might be in our best interests to assist one another."
Nimue smiled, and slipped her ring on.
"I do mean it," the girl said. "Most sincerely."
"What's that?"
"No point pretending," said the girl. "My chevalier and I have done you no harm, though we could have. The castle will be well-fortified: we would welcome your contribution, if you wished to make one."
Did she know how weak that made her sound?
Nimue said, "and will you do us harm?"
"I don't intend to."
Nimue thought of the dead-eyed thrall. "And your chevalier?"
She hesitated; uncertainty flitted across her face. The thrall moved along the treeline in the dark. "Well."
After all, you are only half a person: a shadow persisting in a world full of so much lovely azure light.
The boot on your neck relents, as the enemy falls away, full of fear, and there is only the scent of burning flesh and smoke, falling across your face, darkening the world and reminding you, inexorably, of home.
Nimue ripped her nail across her flint ring again, shedding a wave of golden sparks across the gloom as Maddoc's attacker scrambled backwards, burning. She pursued him as he went, striking her flint again and again until it caught and she could feed one of the cinders into a blazing arc that scalded the very air. She whipped it forward, and fed it all that she could possess: breath and energy and panic, hotter and hotter and hotter, until the flames shone blue and white and the whole clearing seemed as bright as daytime.
She had been distracted – only the first night, and the Selection had not even started, and she had been distracted.
She was distantly aware of the panic on all sides: the merchants and the slavers had woken and scattered along with their steeds, the thralls and slaves had screamed and run, and even Ewythr had disappeared without so much as a word towards his beloved student. Nimue might have found it amusing, in any other moment: in this moment, she was flint-sharp and focused, and the world did not exist but for the shimmer of heat beneath her fingers and the man standing in front of her. So much for a subtle entrance. So much for discretion.
The assassin found secure footing, and righted himself, and hurled himself forward again. He was wearing a thick leather armour off which her crafted fires could only melt, like oil striking water. Maddoc had leapt to his feet and his sword had leapt to his hand: Nimue did not even give him a chance to defend himself, but forced up a wall of burning smoke between her chevalier and the man who would kill him, the scent familiar and acrid and urgent.
Through the smoke burst the thrall, the girl's slave chevalier, who had seized up one of the poleaxes that prodded the addaxes hither and thither. She drove it through the assassin's chest without hesitation; she made it look neat and easy, though the sound that it made as metal parted skin and flesh and bone was one Nimue was certain she would never forget. It was something utterly brute, where her beloved flintwork had always been elegant and sanitised and purifying: it left blood on the thrall's hands and black viscera on the grass below.
The assassin staggered, and found his footing, and bore forward once more, heedless of his own murder. This was the dirty stuff: Nimue's skin roiled to think of how close she might be standing to the necromancer who was working this horror. The thrall's voice was low and alien as she swayed back towards Nimue: "lilitu."
The girl called Lilitu turned, and ran for the cart.
Nimue struck her flint again, but before she could ignite again, Maddoc had emerged through the roil and burn, her white knight against the charcoal sky, wielding not his colichemarde but his dirk. He slashed a long clean line through the smoke, and the dead man swayed on his feet and made no sound as Maddoc flayed a long strip of skin from his throat. She could practically see the char pressing up against his skin, probing along his bones for an escape into the world: his eyes were aglow with the fire he would not unleash. She saw, for the first time, what a Burning Chevalier was and could be, and she was, for the thousandth time, grateful for the presence of Maddoc ap Alcluith.
He turned in a circle, virtually lazy, and when the dead man reached, Maddoc extended a hand to meet him: he used his elbow to force the man's arm up, and leave that dead, slack face exposed, and then – he made it look easy – Maddoc carved eight lines into him. Eight lines: two by two by two. He slashed at eyes and throat and mouth and chest and arm and leg; he severed tendons and ligaments and arteries and nerves. He wielded the dirk as another might turn a paintbrush in hand; he scattered blood like so many sparks.
The dead men could have kept going, if his body could have held him up. It could not, and he fell. Lilitu's thrall walked over with another poleaxe and put it right through his face for good measure, so that he was pinned to the ground like one of the preserved moths Nimue's professor had collected in her first year at the Burning Schools.
She walked away, then, and left Nimue and Maddoc with the dead man and the smoke slowly leaking away around them and the warmth dissipating like a raincloud.
He was wearing an ancient dragon-leather breastplate, off which the fire had rolled. Nimue and Maddoc stared down at it; Nimue swore softly, and Maddoc looked at her, eyes marginally wider beneath his white hood. "He was meant for us," she murmured, and kicked the dead man in the torso, hard. "He came prepared for the char."
She had forgotten how hoarse Maddoc's voice could be, as though he had never recovered from his immolation, as though he had never stopped inhaling smoke: "are you certain?"
"I have to be."
He eyed the other pair. "They might have set this up."
"They might," said Nimue. She ran a nail across her ring – click, click, click. She felt all of her twenty-two years upon her, heavy and insistent, and how few they were, and how sparsely they had prepared her. "But look: if two slaves are all that their House has to offer..."
Ah, but the Lilitu girl's dress was that bit finer than any slave's ought to be.
"Famous last words," Maddoc murmured.
"Oh, don't," Nimue said softly, "don't jinx it now."
There is a smell like petrichor, which stains the air after an artifical fire has been struck: it is flinty, a dry and sharp scent which reminds the stranger of autumn-bronzed leaves and wood varnish and self-immolation. You knew it better once – it was a lull. It should not be as unfamiliar to you as it is now; you ought not have even noticed it, just as she does not notice it.
When you set off down the valley the next morning, it is with another chevalier at your back, a shadow of your own, and you are one of two again, a whole half and a half entire.