“No assassin did this, Adran.”
“How can you be sure?” Queen Adran spoke almost absent-mindedly. She seemed transfixed by the body, utterly unable to take her eyes from boy’s limp form. She was so fascinated she forgot to correct my master for not calling her Queen.
“There are no puncture wounds, no broken neck or bruising of the nerve points and no scent of poison on his breath.”
“Then how did the boy die?”
“His heart probably burst, as Nywulf said. It can happen even to the young and healthy.”
“Are you suggesting Coil the Yellower or Fitchgrass jumped out of a hedge and frightened the boy to death?” My master ignored the sarcasm and rested a finger on Kyril’s chest.
“See the bruise, here, over his heart?”
“It is old.”
“Yes, it is.” Something in my master’s voice—did she lie? “He may have been kicked by a mount or hurt in training. Such things can cause a heart to burst days later.”
“You are sure?”
“There is only one way to be sure,” said my master. “Girton, I will need your knife. And a saw to get through his ribs.”
“No!” Adran moved in front of my master. “I believe you. We’ll not cut him open.” She stared at the body again. “It is sobering, is it not, Merela? We could be struck down at any moment with no warning. It makes a mockery of all our struggles.”
“But does not stop us struggling.”
“No, nothing stops us.” She took a final look at Kyril, leaning in close to his face. “Nothing but death.” She turned to my master. “Merela, you and your boy will not talk to anyone about the bruise. We will tell the family he died a hero saving the future king. I will have Neander conduct the ceremony of leaving tonight.”
We left the laying-out room and returned to our own small bedroom. The first thing I did was change out of my clothes as I felt like the smell of Kyril’s corpse was clinging to me. My master was distracted, pulling aside the greased paper cover so she could stare out of the window.
“Girton, you really had nothing to do with Kyril’s death?”
“No.” Again that sense of betrayal that she thought so little of me. “I hated him, but I have more self-control than to go about murdering people I don’t like. Why don’t you believe me?”
“I do. It is just that if it was not you then our lives are more complex than I thought.”
“What do you mean? Did you lie to Adran? Was Kyril murdered then?”
“Yes, he was murdered. Someone used the Black Hammer to kill him. That was the cause of the bruise over his heart.”
I went cold. My flesh seemed to freeze and my skin to be punctured by painful spines. “Magic? Are you saying there’s a sorcerer loose in the castle? How can you be sure?”
“I could smell it on him.”
“Smell it?”
“Aye, magic leaves a scent like pepper and honey. It is faint but recognisable if you know to look out for it. That is how the Landsmen find sorcerers, though it only works for those unable to control themselves.”
A vivid image came to me: of Heamus sniffing the air around me, of Neander doing the same. Something dark, cold and slow moved within me and it sucked the moisture from my mouth and the feeling from my fingers and toes.
…if it was not you then our lives are more complex than I thought.
The world seemed to spin, as if the earth moved beneath me while I stayed still.
“If it was not me?” I said, the words small and confused. “What do you mean, if it was not me?”
At first she looked puzzled. Then surprised. Then a terrible sadness came over her, almost fear. She sat on the bed, unable to look at me.
“Oh Girton,” she whispered, “what we do? The Whisper-that-Flies-to-the-Ear? The Simple Invisibility?” I stared at her. It seemed she had suddenly become something alien, and though I understood her words they made as much sense to me as the lowing of a draymount.
“Magic, Master? Magic in me? That cannot be.”
“Girton—” she lifted a hand as if to reach for me and then let it fall “—you have always been so clever, my clever boy, so very clever. I thought you knew. When I said tell no one our secrets, not even other assassins, I thought you knew. I thought that you had realised this long ago.” She looked up. “Sometimes I forget you are a child still. That I have always been able to ask anything of you and you do it—your trust in me has always been total. I should have thought harder on that. Why would you question our abilities when I told you they were only tricks?”
“No,” I said, and felt the world around me folding in, becoming pale. Its angles ceased to make sense and our room became both impossibly large and impossibly small at the same time. My skin burned with a cold fire and the air became thick and soupy. “It cannot be,” I said again. “I am not a monster.” She reached out for me and I pulled my arm away. “What we do is only tricks, Master. Tricks.” My heart beat, thready and quick like a small animal desperate to escape a cage.
“Some yes. The Careless Gossip, the Wild Gaze, these are techniques that, given time, anyone can—”
“I cannot do those things.”
“Not yet, but you can do other things and …”
“Magic.”
“It is not what you think.”
“I am a sorcerer?” It was as if my life stretched before me along a path of desiccated yellow lined with the corpses of the innocent, at its end was a swinging blood gibbet, door open, waiting for me—and it was as if I had always known this. Now she had said it I could not deny it.
“Yes, We are sorcerers, Girton, if you must use that word.” She sounded so reasonable, as if she had not pronounced a death sentence on me. “And it is not the curse others would have you believe.”
I took a step back, meeting the wall and sliding down it until I sat on the floor.
“Have I ruined you?” said my master. “Leaving this so late? You must try and understand, Girton.” She slid from the bed and went to her knees, taking my hands in hers. “This does not change you. You are no more a monster than I am.”
“Why doesn’t the land die beneath my feet?” My voice was as brittle as a tree in the sourlands. “When I whisper why doesn’t it affect anyone?”
“Because it is a very small magic—” she sat back on the bed “—and we pay the land back with our blades. We follow an older way.”
“You have trained me to be a …” my voice rising.
“No,” she said softly. “There is no training. You were born with a gift. Your mother had it and you inherited it.”
“You knew what sort of creature I am.” I breathed. “You knew all this time and you didn’t say.”
“Yes, Girton,” she said gently. I took my hand from hers. “I knew. We are the same. Why do you think slavers raised you in the sourlands? It was because they feared you. They knew so little about magic they thought little boys could tap into the life of the land.”
“We were all sorcerers there? All of us?” The information like body blows.