Linen and wool against his skin, a faint draught from the window. Kiiren's musky scent, the clinging odour of neatsfoot oil, a faint trace of wine and spices drifting in under the door, the stink of the river outside. The crackle of the charcoal brazier, the sentries on the wall walk, and an owl setting out on its evening hunt. His own heartbeat pounding in his ears, becoming one with the voice of the sea, the hiss and rattle of pebbles as each wave sighed its last upon the land.
He opened his eyes. The four walls of the tower room were gone; only the brazier remained, the shimmer of its coals echoing the molten gold of the sun, just rising above the ocean. Mal looked about him in panic.
"Where are we?"
Kiiren smiled and ran his fingers through the gravel. Mal stared down at the beach. Every pebble demanded his attention, begging to be touched, examined, chosen. He scooped up a double handful and let them go again, watching in fascination as they fell through his fingers. Tiny shards of stone clung to his damp skin: flecks of amber, grey and white.
"Come," Kiiren said, holding out a hand.
Now they were walking along the beach in the bright light of noon, the sea at their right hand, low wooded hills to the left. An ochre-sailed ship stood at anchor offshore.
"You remember this place," Kiiren said, grinning.
Mal realised with a start that the skrayling was now his own height, with the fangs and tattoos typical of his kind. And yet he was the same Kiiren, Mal knew it in his bones.
"This is a dream," he whispered.
"Of course." The skrayling held out his arms. "Remember."
"No."
Mal backed away, the pebbles crunching underfoot. Blood began to pour from the skrayling's open mouth. Mal turned to run, but the trunk of the tree blocked his path. No, not this. He could not let Kiiren see this…
Digging his fingernails into the bark he began to drag himself upwards, his lower body a dead weight, as if his legs were paralysed. The bark scraped the skin from his belly but he felt nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing but the stars overhead, impossibly distant. Only a little further. He grasped a branch and tried to haul himself up, but it snapped under his weight and he fell, twisting in the air, and landed on hands and knees on the hard stone floor.
"Erishen? Amayi, is it you?"
Mal's eyes snapped open. They were back in the tower room. Was he awake now? He sat back on his haunches, blinking away the last shreds of the nightmare. Amayi? Where had he heard that word before?
Kiiren leant across the brazier, his eyes reflecting the lamplight like a cat's.
"? amayi, niníhami anosenno. Einotabe'? mall?."
It sounded like – No. That could not be.
"Mall?," Mal whispered. That was the word he and Sandy had used to mean "people, grown-ups". He had always assumed it was a play on his own name. Sandy had made it all up to entertain him. Hadn't he?
"Lerr – lerr?'a ohilanno," Kiiren said, his voice trembling. You know my words.
"H?." Yes.
The skrayling gave a cry of joy. Crossing the small space between them he flung his arms around Mal, who gritted his teeth against the pain of his still-fresh wounds. Kiiren was babbling in the strange language, between hoarse sobs. All Mal could catch was "people" and something about "dead", and over and over that name, Erishen. He stroked the skrayling's spiky black hair awkwardly, his mind a whirl of confusion. What was going on here? Who was Erishen, and why did Sandy know the skraylings' tongue? More importantly, who was dead?
Mal pulled himself free of Kiiren's embrace and got unsteadily to his feet.
"Erishen! Amayi!"
Ignoring Kiiren's protests he staggered out of the tower and across the dining room. Too hot in here! He opened the outer door and drew in a deep breath of cool, moist evening air. He stepped out onto the landing, towards the stair that led down into the outer ward, but the stones buckled and twisted before his eyes. Clutching the balustrade he sank down onto the top step and pressed his cheek against the blissfully cold stone.
Sandy. Had Kiiren attempted some kind of scrying through him, and seen – but he had visited Sandy only yesterday, surely the fit had not been fatal? Mal jumped to his feet and stumbled down the stairs.
The more he moved about, the better his command of his limbs became. By the time he reached the main gates, he felt almost whole again. He hammered on the ancient timbers.
"Let me out!"
He had to get to Sandy, find out what was happening–
A door opened in the passageway under the tower, and a guard poked his head out.
"What do you want?"
"I– I need to leave."
"No one leaves the castle after curfew. Lieutenant's orders."
"But–"
"No one. Now clear off before I report you."
Mal turned around and headed back the way he had come. Before he had gone ten yards the heavens opened and rain began to fall. Seconds later, thunder rumbled in the distance.
Mal ran for the meagre shelter of the archway linking the ambassador's lodging to the Wakefield Tower. Beyond it was a garden, one of the many remnants of the Tower's former role as a royal palace. Rose bushes drooped in the downpour, water dripping from their leaves into the puddles that stretched across the gravel paths. White petals streaked with crimson fell to the ground under the onslaught and melted into slush. He stared at the squat rectangle of the Cradle Tower, where the welcoming glow of a fire gilded the windowpanes of a guardroom on the lower floor. Perhaps he could find a way out through the sally-port?
He skirted the garden and its betraying gravel, then went down a short flight of steps into the sunken pathway around the foot of the tower. Rainwater pooled on the worn paving and lapped around the toes of his boots. He edged towards the gateway, ducking down as he passed the window.
Sounds came from within: the idle conversation of bored men, the thump of a tankard on wood. He scouted all the way round, but the only exit was through the gate in the tower. Barred, of course, and most likely locked. Even if he got out, there was Bedlam itself to break into. And if Monkton caught him trying to escape… He shivered. The weals on his back were stinging again beneath their sodden bandages.
His mind was clearing now. What was he doing running around the castle half naked in the rain? Sandy was fine, he told himself. He had made a foolish assumption based on a few words of a language that just happened to resemble a childhood game, when his mind was fuddled with the drugged smoke. A misunderstanding, nothing more. Certainly not worth risking arrest – and another flogging – for.
No, it was his duty to find out what was going on. The skraylings believed in the reincarnation of souls and, unless he was very much mistaken, Kiiren believed him to be this Erishen reborn. But who or what was Erishen? A prophet, or perhaps a great hero of legend, like King Arthur? That would explain why he was picked out to guard their ambassador. He caught himself grinning like a fool, and had to remind himself this was just a heathen superstition, though perhaps one he could use to his advantage.
It was part of the intelligencer's stock-in-trade, the assumption of a false identity to gull his victims into revealing what they knew. Baines had drilled him on the essentials; now it was time to put his training into practice. With a last wistful glance at the sally-port, he made his way back to the ambassador's lodgings.
Kiiren was waiting by the window overlooking the outer ward, his whole body tense with anxiety. He must have been watching all this time – assuming he could see anything through the gloom. Mal rubbed a hand over his rain-damp face, unsure how to proceed. If Kiiren started telling everyone about this Erishen business, it could go ill for them both.
"You are cold, Erishen-amayi," Kiiren said, retrieving a towel from the bench by the fire. "Sit, dry yourself. Others return soon."
Mal sank onto the bench and began scrubbing his wet hair with the towel. To his surprise Kiiren knelt at his feet, gazing up at him. In the darkness his shadowed face looked almost human.
"I am sorry it had to be this way, amayi," Kiiren said. "I knew when first I saw you, something was wrong and you did not remember. I hoped that to see me again, to share our memories, would bring all back."
"Only pieces," Mal replied, realising with a shock that it was true. He did remember things he could not possibly know. Was Kiiren right after all?
"That is why I had to try qoheetsakhan." Kiiren glanced towards the tower room. "I am sorry if it frightened you to remember so much so quickly."
"I… I thought I understood your words, but already it is fading again."
Kiiren nodded. "It may take time, and perhaps more qoheetsakhan."
Mal said nothing. He did not relish the thought of another dose of the skrayling drug, if it muddled his thoughts so.
"Please, amayi, tell no one of this night," Kiiren said in a low, urgent tone, glancing at the door. "It is too soon. If you – if we are found out…"
"I understand," Mal lied, hoping his relief did not show. Say as little as possible, Baines had told him; let the gull fill in the blanks and his own hopes and fears will betray him. Still, he could not help but wonder why Kiiren wanted to keep this a secret. Some incomprehensible matter of skrayling politics, perhaps, in which the ambassador did not care to show his hand too early.
Kiiren smiled and touched Mal's cheek, then leapt to his feet. The sound of skrayling voices, slurred with drink, drifted up from the outer ward.
"They return," Kiiren said.
He disappeared into the tower room and returned a moment later with Mal's shirt and doublet.
"Quick, into chamber."
He thrust the bundle of clothing into Mal's arms and all but pushed him towards the doorway into the bedchamber. Mal needed no further prompting. Within moments he had retreated to the bed and closed the curtains. Belatedly he remembered he still had his wet, muddy boots on. He pulled them off and slipped them to the floor just as the front door banged open.
The guards' rowdy chatter faded into muttered apologies. Mal guessed that Kiiren had waited behind in the dining room, and was giving his men a good telling-off for coming back in such a drunken state. He smiled at the thought of the slight, soft-spoken ambassador facing down a dozen burly skrayling warriors. Like a raw young captain on his first command? his memory prompted. No, he and Kiiren were nothing alike.
With a sigh he lay down on the bed, ignoring his stinging back. So many questions buzzed around his head, but they all came down to one central point. Why was Kiiren being so secretive about this Erishen business? Mal thought back to the debate in the skrayling pavilion. Had Kiiren only suspected then what he now believed? It seemed to be the real reason he was so concerned about Mal's treatment, and yet he was hiding it from his own people. The young ambassador was up to something, and whether it boded well or ill for England, Mal could not tell.
With a soldier's sense of priorities, he forced himself to relax. Sleep now; tomorrow was time enough to worry about the dangers that lay ahead.