13
“How about a cream horn?” Bitharn asked, broadening her smile to cover her desperation. Bright Lady save her, but she was not good with children. Mothers tended to keep their babies away, as though coming too close to her might infect them with eccentricity, and generally Bitharn was quite content with that. She’d sooner face down a pack of ravening Maolites than be given the care of an eight-year-old for an afternoon … but no one had asked her, so here she was.
Thankfully the little girl nodded, though she didn’t pull her thumb out of her mouth to reply. Bitharn breathed a sigh of relief, took the girl’s other hand, and led her out of her house. Only when they were four doors down did she finally turn to the child and ask, “Where should we go to get one?”
The girl—Mirri, that was her name—pointed down the street, back the way they’d come. Bitharn smiled brightly and took her in a roundabout circle, putting another block of houses between them and the child’s own home before they started back in that direction. “Tell me when we’re getting close. What’s your favorite kind?”
She watched Mirri carefully while she tried to draw the child out of her shell with chatter. The girl might be a little older than she’d first guessed. Closer to ten than eight, maybe, but kept small by hunger and still clinging to a baby’s habits. Many of the children in Tarne Crossing were like that, she’d noticed; perhaps it was something that living on the border did to them. Children who grew up in war-torn lands were the same way: they felt the hardness of the world too young, and it blighted them like saplings hit by a late frost.
Kelland was back at the house with Mirri’s mother, who had broken her leg in a bad fall last spring. It had healed poorly, leaving her with a twisted, painful limb that made it impossible for her to stand more than an hour at a time or carry a pail of water from the river back to their house, let alone help run the vegetable stall that was their livelihood. Her injury put a heavy burden on the family, and the strain of it probably went some way toward explaining Mirri’s size and behavior.
While Kelland’s prayers could likely set the leg straight, and even have the woman back on her feet by sundown, the leg would have to be broken again and the bones realigned first. Mirri’s father and her brother, a strong lad at fourteen, were there to help with that. Breaking a grown woman’s leg was not easy, and forcing it back into alignment would not be quick or pleasant work. But the three of them could manage it, which made Bitharn unnecessary, and there was no need for Mirri to hear her mother’s screams or witness her agony. Kelland could be frightening in his power, too, and a child might misunderstand.
So she had taken the girl out of the home, and now she had to find some way of keeping Mirri occupied for the rest of the afternoon, until the worst of it was over and it was safe for them to go back. Bitharn had no idea how she was going to manage that. Distracting the girl with pastries was a start, but afterward? What did people do with children all day?
As they circled around an apothecary’s stall and the bakery came into view, Bitharn realized with a sinking heart that she might not even get the cream horn.
A cart stacked high with wicker cages of poultry had lost a wheel on the rutted road just outside the bakery, upsetting its load. Frantic chickens and white-feathered geese honked and flapped all across the road amidst the wreckage of their cages. The carter was shouting hopelessly at his birds; passersby tried to help, stole his stray fowl, or simply did their best to dodge the panicked poultry as they scrambled down the street. The birds, too, were wild with confusion. Some tried to flee, some pecked at the crumbs that littered the baker’s front steps, and all contributed to the chaos. The baker’s door was shut against his feathered foes, and it was plain that no one would be buying so much as a penny roll until the road was cleared.
“Well,” Bitharn said, eyeing the madness, “would you like to watch the show?”
Mirri shook her head. She popped her thumb out of her mouth just long enough to say “Hungry,” then slid it back in.
Bitharn didn’t need another look at the girl’s skinny shoulders to believe that. “Of course you are. Where else can we get good pastries?”
The child sucked her thumb harder, thinking. “Mathas,” she offered at last. “He has good tarts.”
“Oh? Where’s that?”
“This way.” Mirri took Bitharn’s hand and led her away from the squawking birds, taking her through the streets with a confidence that belied her constant thumb-sucking. Clearly the girl knew the town, and the people they passed seemed to know her. A few called friendly greetings, which Mirri returned with solemn nods. Most did not, however, and Bitharn reflected on how strange it must be to live in a town that swelled to bursting each winter and shrank back down each spring. Half the people on the streets seemed to be strangers.
Mathas’ shop sat on a corner between two narrow but well-trafficked streets, next to a tavern and not far from a scribes’ hall. Tarne Crossing was too small to have the extremes of wealth and poverty that defined city neighborhoods in Bitharn’s experience, but nonetheless it seemed to her that the shops were a little more prosperous here, the houses a little larger. At this hour the place should have been crowded with people buying their daily bread and goodwives bringing their own loaves to bake in the communal ovens for a penny. Instead the bakery’s doors were closed and the street outside was empty. Only a scowling old man sat on the steps, turning a battered hat around in his hands and glaring at passersby with muted fury.
Mirri hung back from the man, but Bitharn could see no reason to be shy.
“Excuse me,” she said, walking up to the shuttered shop, “but is this bakery closed?”
The old man squinted against the sun as he looked up at her. He had the browned neck and callused hands of a laborer, and he gawked openly at the sight of a woman dressed in breeches and carrying a bow. Just as Bitharn was about to snap at him to stop staring, he offered an answer. “Baker broke his neck last night. The brewer’s boy found his body outside Steepshank’s this evening. Figure he got drunk and tripped.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” Bitharn bowed her head politely and began to turn away.
“Wait,” he said. “You the woman travels with the Burnt Knight? Pretty girl in men’s clothes—don’t see too many of those.”
Bitharn nodded. She would have liked to lie—no one asked that question unless they intended to ask for something else after—but she couldn’t make herself do it with Mirri standing right there.
“I’ve got a boon to ask.” The man hesitated, crumpling the soft cloth of his hat in his hands. He seemed to shrink into himself, suddenly unsure. “My name’s Haeric. I’d have come to ask him personal, but … maybe you can take him my question, instead.”
Mirri or no Mirri, Bitharn was not about to let herself be guilted into promising that. Kelland had too many demands on his time already. But she could be polite. “What is it?”
“Mathas wasn’t a drinker. The baker. I mean—” He cut off, squeezing his eyes shut, and shook his head. Then he tried again, fumbling for words. “It doesn’t make a scrap of sense. I’ve worked for Mathas since he lost his leg, near ten years back. The man never had more than a mug of ale with his dinner. He didn’t like anything got in the way of his work, being as that was all the fates left to him. If he was going to drink himself stupid, he wouldn’t have done it during the night. That’s when he does the bread for the morning. Put that together with his girl from Langmyr goes missing not a week earlier, and my wagon’s gone this morning, and old Clover, too, and the whole thing smells worse than week-old fish. I’m worried I might be next. If you could just look into it, please—”
“I will convey your concerns to Sir Kelland,” Bitharn said, coolly correct.
Haeric took his cue from her formality. “Much obliged,” he muttered, dropping his eyes back to his battered hat as Bitharn left with the girl.
At the third shop there were neither panicked ducks nor broken-necked bakers, and Mirri got her cream horn at last. Bitharn bought herself a honeyed roll studded with raisins and nuts, and the two of them ate in the shop’s small anteroom, warmed by the fires of the great ovens nearby. There was hot mint tea and spiced wine, slightly bitter from oversteeping, to drive away the chill from within as well as without.
The baker refused to take their coins once she realized who Bitharn was. “It’s payment enough just to have you,” she said, and her tone brooked no argument. “We’re mindful of all the Burnt Knight does for us, and that with our own Blessed gone.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Bitharn said, though she would have preferred to pay. Even small gifts carried a weight of obligation, which her temple upbringing and long travels with Kelland left her unable to ignore. But again she felt that Mirri’s presence bound her to courtesy, so she did not insist.
It was still early in the afternoon when they left the baker’s shop, Mirri clutching a braided stick of bread to share with her family at dinner. As they walked through the streets, the girl turned to Bitharn with the peculiar gravity of the very young.
“I want to be a Sun Knight when I grow up,” she announced.
“Do you?” Bitharn smiled. “Why is that?”
“Because you can help people, and they give you things, and they’re always happy to see you.”
“Not always, and it isn’t quite so easy. But that’s a worthy goal.”
“How can I do it?”
“You can’t, dearling.” Bitharn ruffled the girl’s short black hair, taken by an odd, nostalgic sadness. She’d had that same wish herself once. “You can keep a kind heart and a pure mind, and you can hope, but in the end the goddess chooses. We don’t. And perhaps it’s better that way.”
“Why?” Mirri frowned. She wasn’t sucking her thumb anymore, Bitharn noticed; she’d taken to swinging her arms loose by her sides, the way Bitharn herself did, and kept the bread-stick easily in one hand.
“Because the Bright Lady knows our hearts better than we do. She knows who has the strength to bear her gifts. It isn’t easy to be Called, and it’s harder still to live up to the oaths once you take them. Once you go out into the world … everyone expects things, everyone demands them, and many think they’re entitled without a word of thanks. People will try to use your name to justify themselves, or trick you into helping them to power, and sometimes you have to decide whether it does more good to let them or balk them.
“There’s never enough magic to soothe all the world’s ills, and choosing who to help and who to leave … it’s a heavy weight to bear, knowing you had the power to help someone but didn’t, or couldn’t, because you judged someone else needed your magic more. And the hardest part, I think, is remembering how to keep a good heart when you see the ugliest parts of people’s souls every day. If they were kinder to each other, and more responsible themselves, much of our work wouldn’t be necessary—but they aren’t, and you have to help them anyway. How do you keep a heart generous enough to cure without condemning?”
“You help the good people and stop the bad ones, that’s how,” Mirri said matter-of-factly.
“You do,” Bitharn agreed. “But most people aren’t Sun Knights or reavers out of Ang’arta. Most people are a little of both. Even Sir Cadifar sinned out of jealousy, and even the Winter Queen loved her sons. What do you do then?”
Mirri squinted at her toes, thinking, and kicked a loose cobblestone. A pigeon startled away. “I don’t want to be a Sun Knight anymore. I want to be like you.”
“Ah. Well,” Bitharn said, trying not to smile, “that’s a little easier.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon outside the town walls, playing at archery with a scrap of canvas strung up between the ditch-stakes. She didn’t want to take the child out of the walls’ sight, but they couldn’t very well shoot arrows inside. Bitharn got a boy’s bow from one of the gate guards, who gave her an odd look but acquiesced once she explained her position. Being the Burnt Knight’s companion was good for some things, once in a while.
She expected Mirri to get bored after a few rounds, but to her surprise the girl took to the lessons with a fierce determination, aiming each arrow as if the target were her worst enemy’s heart. The child had an instinct for the correct stance and hand placements, and by the end of the afternoon she was hardly missing the canvas target at all. Bitharn had picked a big one and set it close, but she was still impressed.
They were picking up the arrows from the last round when Mirri suddenly straightened and waved Bitharn over.
“Look.” The girl pointed to the muddy ditch.
It took Bitharn a moment to see what she meant. The ditch was shallow and foul-smelling; while most of the town’s night soil was carted out to fertilize the fields to the east, whatever the dirt-carriers missed was thrown over the walls into the ditch. There was nothing remarkable in that, and at first Bitharn couldn’t see why Mirri had called her.
Then she saw the footsteps in the mud. There were two sets leading out from a postern gate: a pair of heavy boots that had pressed deep into the soft soil, hard enough to leave clear imprints of the nails in their soles, and a single boot, slightly smaller, matched with the circular pocks of a peg leg. The prints were parallel to one another and each set occasionally trampled over the other, so they had to have been walking side by side at the same time. Two Boots got heavier where Peg Leg got lighter, but the reverse was never true; that meant Two Boots was supporting—and, judging by the grooves left by the wooden leg in places, sometimes dragging—the other person.
“Mathas had a wooden leg,” Mirri whispered. “Are those wooden leg prints?”
“I think they are.” Bitharn followed the trail as far as she could, but the ground quickly hardened away from the ditch, and the prints became too muddled for easy following. She could not see where, or if, they returned. She would have liked to circle around the walls and see where Peg Leg came back—Mathas had been found dead inside the walls, so at some point he had to have returned—but sunset was drawing near. The western horizon was red with the promise of it, and she had to bring the girl home.
Reluctantly Bitharn went back to where Mirri waited. She pointed to the tracks, beckoning the child near. “What do those tell you?”
Mirri looked at the prints and shrugged. “I don’t know. That Mathas was here?”
“And recently.” Bitharn stooped to show her, tracing a fingertip along the edge of the tracks. “Here, see how clear the marks are by the water? Right up here, a handspan from the edge. You can see a dent for every nail in his boots. It’s colder at night than it is now; I’ll bet this mud is half ice until highsun. If you walked this way by night, or early in the morning before it thawed, your prints would look like this. If you came this way now, when it’s warmer, there’d be nothing left but blobs. Soft mud sticks to your feet; it leaves sucking holes, not detailed prints like these.”
“So he was here in the night?”
“Last night, if I’m not mistaken, or very early this morning. The mud hasn’t filled in yet. Tracks don’t stay clear long in ground this soft.”
“There was someone else with him,” Mirri said. “More tracks.”
“There was.” Bitharn stood up, wiping her hands on her breeches. “But that’s a mystery for another day. We need to get that bow back to the guards, and your mother’s likely waiting for you.”
“Will she be well?” Mirri asked wistfully.
Bitharn hesitated. There was so much hope in the girl’s eyes, and surely it would be harmless to give her the promise … but she had seen too much go wrong, with too little cause, to answer with anything more than the truth. “If the Bright Lady answers our prayers, she will be.”
Mirri nodded, and they went home.
CELESTIA HAD INDEED HEARD KELLAND’S CALL. Mirri’s mother was standing on her own two legs when they returned at the end of sundown prayers; the right was unsteady from lack of use, but she walked to the door to welcome them, and she kept her balance when Mirri bowled into her skirts for a hug.
“Thank you,” the woman said, her eyes shining with tears. She held her daughter close; her hand trembled on Mirri’s back. “Thank you for letting me work again.”
“It is Celestia who deserves your thanks,” Kelland said, emerging from the candlelit room behind her. “We do no more than channel her blessings, and for us that is only duty.” His face was shadowed by weariness and his voice was rough with it, but he stood straight as a tourney herald and his white cloak was spotless as ever.
“I’m grateful all the same. Won’t you stay for dinner?”
Bitharn saw Kelland hesitate, and answered quickly in his stead. “It’s generous of you to offer, and I wish that we could, but we’re needed elsewhere. Please, rest well.”
“We could have stayed,” Kelland murmured as they left.
She shrugged and took his elbow, hooking her arm around his and leaning into his side. As they stepped into the street they could have been any young couple strolling through a winter evening. So she told herself, closing her thoughts to his medallion and her bow and everything else that made them who they were, not who she wished they could be.
Just for a moment, Bitharn thought, she could be allowed to forget that. Just until they got back to their inn. “I wanted to enjoy the walk. Alone, with you. We don’t get much time to ourselves here.”
Guards wearing the black bull on red walked the wooden walls above them, lighting torches that sent up thin trails of smoke and burned almost invisibly against the setting sun. Night would fall before they finished setting their ring of fire around Tarne Crossing; but for now the world, too, was between phases, and its transitory beauty brought an ache to Bitharn’s heart. The golden hour had faded, but some of its warmth still glowed along westward walls and high-peaked roofs, while on fences and bare twigs the silver lace of frost glimmered before the dusk.
Kelland drew her closer as they walked. The contact, shoulder to shoulder, warmed her. “What did you do today? I noticed you took the girl.”
“I didn’t think she needed to see her mother like that.”
“You said children make you nervous.”
“It wasn’t so bad.” Bitharn told him about their misadventures in search of a cream horn, Mirri’s swiftly quenched desire to become a Sun Knight, and their archery practice outside the town walls. She was hardly listening to her own words; the story was far less important than the feel of him by her side and the rare moment of closeness in the privacy that twilight allowed. The soft clicking of the shells in his hair was sweeter than music to her ears. “She has a good hand and a good eye, and I think she’s a natural tracker.”
“Give her a stubborn streak wider than the Seivern and a complete unwillingness to play fair, and she’ll be well on her way to achieving her goal.” Kelland gave her a slight, fond smile, barely visible in the dusk.
Bitharn didn’t know what came over her. Seized by impulse, she leaned up on her toes and kissed him right on that smile, shocked at her own daring but not—once the amazement subsided—not sorry at all. Kelland startled like a splashed cat, but she still had her arm twined around his and she wouldn’t let go. She could feel his heartbeat thundering through his sun-marked tabard. Her own seemed to be going even faster. She had to remember to breathe, and was suddenly and deeply grateful that nightfall hid her flush.
“You were right,” she heard herself say smugly, if a trifle quickly, turning to continue down the street as if nothing had happened. “I don’t play fair at all.”
“You don’t,” Kelland agreed, hurrying to catch up.
THE NEXT DAY HE WANTED TO see Mathas’ body. Bitharn thought that was a waste of time, but between the peculiar tracks in the ditch and the fact that the missing baker’s girl was Langmyrne, Kelland argued that it was worth a look. Since a dead man was less likely to ask them for favors than anyone else they might see, Bitharn let him talk her into it, but she wasn’t expecting much. She had other concerns on her mind.
In the clear light of morning she regretted the kiss. No, not the kiss; Bitharn couldn’t make herself feel sorry for that. What she did regret was lying to him that night outside Willowfield.
She did, in fact, want him to break his oaths. One of them, at least. She wanted it very badly indeed.
He never would. Bitharn was certain of that. Not only would Kelland keep his oaths until his dying day, he would never admit to temptation. Not to himself, not to her, maybe not even to his goddess. But she was equally certain that he wanted it as badly as she did. It was in his wary glances, the forced casualness of his conversation, the way he kept a careful distance from her after last night’s kiss, as if the slightest touch of her skin might burn him. He wanted desperately—as she did—and both of them were duty-bound to say nothing and do nothing that might inflame that desire.
Under those circumstances, spending the morning in the company of a corpse didn’t seem like such a terrible idea.
Mathas’ body was laid in a corpse-cellar beneath the town chapel, as was common custom for those with the means to afford a decent funeral but not a private service. He would be burned at sunset in a day or two, whenever Tarne Crossing had enough dead to justify a pyre or the insults of putrefaction became too great to bear. Until then his mortal remains waited in the cellar, where the coolness of stone and air kept decay to a minimum.
A shroud of fine white linen, embroidered with Celestia’s sunburst in gold, covered Mathas’ body on its stone bier. Similar shrouds masked the other two corpses in the cellar. Local superstition held that it was bad luck to look upon the faces of the dead, and while Celestia’s dedicated were supposed to banish the shadows of misbelief from the minds of the people, they usually let such harmless customs stand. Real heresies caused them enough trouble.
Kelland glanced at Bitharn, who nodded almost imperceptibly. She felt strangely apprehensive at the thought of unveiling the corpse, though she didn’t know why. It seemed that the knight shared something of that feeling, for he swept off the shroud with a single swift motion, as if it would have been too awful to do it slowly.
But there was nothing terrible about the corpse. The body was bloated, the eyes sunken, and the face pallid behind a bristle of stark black beard, but both Kelland and Bitharn had seen far too many dead men to be disconcerted by that. There were no wounds, no signs of struggle, nothing at all to justify that odd prickle of fear.
Bitharn came closer to examine the body. Nothing unusual, but …
“There’s mud on his boot,” she observed, touching the caked toe, “and on his peg.” The dry mud crumbled easily under her fingers. It had to have been wet when he was walking; otherwise it would have cracked and fallen away. Even then, he couldn’t have walked far without shaking it off.
“Where did his friend say he was found?”
“Outside a tavern in town.”
“There isn’t mud this deep anywhere inside the walls.”
“But we know he went outside,” Bitharn said. “He walked through the ditch, came back, and died before the mud had time to dry or get knocked from his boots. What I can’t fathom is why a man drunk enough to trip and break his neck goes outside the walls on the same night he dies. Why? What’s out there to make him do that?”
“If that is what happened.” Kelland shook his head doubtfully. He drew out the golden sunburst that he wore around his neck—his knight’s medallion, marked with the symbol of his faith rather than the emblem of a mortal lord. Clasping the sunburst in his right hand, he began a sonorous prayer, calling upon the Bright Lady to grant her Light of Truth.
White light surrounded him in a nimbus, flickered, and failed. Bitharn bit back a surprised oath. She had never seen Kelland falter in a prayer since the earliest days of his training. The Blessed simply did not fail, unless …
… unless they were badly beset by doubt, and on the verge of breaking their oaths.
She looked at him, eyes wide, but Kelland’s face revealed nothing. He started the prayer again, reciting the syllables with calm determination, and this time when the white light blossomed it filled the corpse-cellar with its radiance. It was so bright that it hurt her eyes; those shadows that were not obliterated were thrown back to the far corners.
Bitharn’s relief was short-lived, for what the blessed light revealed of Mathas’ corpse was monstrous. His nose was slit, his left eye gouged; bloody lashes flapped around the hole. His lips had been torn away, leaving him with a scarlet grin. Ragged cuts and tiny punctures riddled his face and throat and chest. His fingers had been broken and wrenched in different directions like a clump of trampled grass. She couldn’t count the number of burns on his flesh.
“Around a gag,” Kelland said with the iron serenity that fell upon him when his anger threatened to break loose. He touched the rope clenched in the corpse’s bloodstained teeth. Bits of flesh flecked the gag; it had been in there when his lips were cut.
“This wasn’t done to make him talk.” Bitharn felt bile rise in her throat. “It was—for fun?”
Kelland reached across the mutilated body and pried open the lid of Mathas’ remaining eye. Pupil and iris alike were obscured behind a swirl of ivory mist, which continued to roil as Bitharn watched.
“Not for fun,” Kelland said. The light died around him. The baker’s body returned to its pretense of wholeness as the shadows flooded back in. “To draw us out. The Thornlady is here, and this is her challenge.”
“You can’t meet it alone.” Bitharn said it with more firmness than she felt. She wasn’t sure how much use her arrows would be against a Thorn’s spells, but she was sure that she couldn’t let Kelland go off on his own. He needed her help, even if he was too bullheaded stubborn to say so. Her arrows might only be a distraction, but a distraction could be a crucial edge—and who was to say that she wouldn’t get a lucky shot? Thorns died like anyone else with a yard of steel-tipped ash in the eye.
From the mulish look on Kelland’s face she saw that the knight knew it, too, and didn’t want to give in. “I can. Bitharn—”
“Don’t coddle me. Don’t protect me. You need someone to watch your back. The Thorn won’t be alone. She has her ghoul-hounds.”
“She doesn’t care about them. They aren’t a weakness.”
“I am?”
“That isn’t what I meant.” He touched the corpse’s cold blue lips, bringing up a finger stained with crumbling flecks of flesh that belied the dead man’s illusion of peace. His hand trembled in the air—with rage or fear, she didn’t know. “This is what she is. This is what we face: a creature who would torture a man like this and consider it holy service. A creature who worships pain. You cannot ask me to bring you into her reach.”
“That’s exactly why you have to.” Bitharn crossed her arms, refusing to soften at the sight of his flinch. She wasn’t thrilled at the thought of facing a Thorn—it terrified her, in truth—but neither was she a helpless maiden who’d faint at the first sign of danger. “You didn’t have any trouble bringing me to Silverpool. Or to Rhyanne Tower. You needed me there. And those bandits on the River Kings’ Road when we first crossed into Langmyr? Right now they’d be prancing around on your horse, wearing your armor and waving your sword, if it hadn’t been for me.”
“I know that. I know all of that. That’s why you have to stay back. This is different. She is different.”
“If that’s true, it’s only because you need me even more here. Promise me you won’t try to fight her alone.” If he gave his word, he’d be bound to it: a Knight of the Sun couldn’t break an oath. “Promise me.”
He balked for a long while, his dark eyes filled with anguish, but in the end Kelland bowed his head, acquiescing. “I promise. Bright Lady forgive me, I promise. I won’t fight her alone.”