“I—”
“You don’t really know him, Girton. A little knowledge of him is all you have, so do as she says for now and stick close to Rufra.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “But we will not ignore the others merely to frame your friend. Not if there is another way.” I felt her shiver and she removed her hand, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were cold. “I feel like we are in the eye of a storm, Girton. It whirls around us so fast, everything is a blur and we cannot move in any direction for fear of stepping to our deaths.”
I could not sleep after her chilling pronouncement, and sleep was what I wanted more than anything. Unpleasant thoughts slid into my mind to war with themselves: the snarling dogs, the lies my master had told me, the terrible feeling those symbols I had found in Heamus’s room had caused within me, images of Drusl flouncing off with another squire.
The idea of magic no longer seemed as horrific as it had at first. Was this how it worked its way in? By slowly becoming normal? On the other hand, if those terrible symbols I had seen in Heamus’s room were against magic, could it really be so bad?
Had it changed me? Was I a different person?
The sullen anger that had burned inside me ebbed. It was not gone, but I felt foolish about it and recognised it as a childish thing. My master had never done anything but protect me and help me. Her only betrayal was to overestimate my intelligence.
I still could not sleep so went to the window and pulled aside the greased paper to stare out over Festival. Fires burned but they were fewer now. It was late enough for most revellers to have left and movement far below caught my eye. A single torch moved across the courtyard. It was joined by another and then another. Unsure whether this might be important I was about to wake my master when I realised what I was seeing. This was the funeral procession for Kyril.
We always take out our dead in the night. The body is laid out in the house together with the best gifts for Xus the family can afford. Then the family leave and the officiating priest comes with his retainers and his bier and they take the body, and the gifts, away. It is tradition. We pay tribute to Xus the unseen by pretending that our dead simply disappear. Or maybe we do not want to confront the fact that the Tired Lands are so short of resources that even the bodies of the dead have a use. The swillers pay the priests for bodies, and the bodies feed the pigs whose meat keeps us alive.
Death was nothing new to me, but the deaths I had witnessed before had been through the agency of my master or myself and in the name of justice. There had been point and reason to them but this death, this boy who had lain silent and perfect upon the slab? His death served no purpose that I could see.
I did not sleep until very late.
Interlude
This is a dream of what was.
He is thirteen.
Today he will kill his first man.
The land is a painting where the artist has only sickly yellows to daub onto his canvas—a hazy mist of burnt-sienna dust suspended between yellow land and yellow sky.
They have trekked across the eastern sourlands eking out their water and food until they are forced to tap their great mount, Xus’s, veins and share the animal’s life. They cannot take too much from him and what they have is never enough. Even powered by the mount’s great heart he feels light-headed as he stumbles forward. When they leave the sourlands it takes his eyes time to adjust to this new world with its garish, unnaturally bright, colours. The distance to the horizon seems impossibly far and for days after the kill he will smell the sourlands on his clothes, his skin. He will blame his constant nausea on it.
The village is barely worthy of the name. Five houses clustered inside the palisade walls of a longhouse built of timbers and roofed with sods. It squats in the humid air and bored guards in badly kept up leather armour lounge around the gate. Slaves, bent and twisted by hard lives, trudge past through ankle-deep mud as they bring in the harvest from the surrounding fields.
“Friend,” says his master to a slave who looks blankly at them as he walks past. All the man’s concentration is focused on putting one foot in front of another. He looks impossibly old, he must be in his late twenties, or maybe even thirty. He is missing his front teeth.
“Can’t stop,” he says dully. The words whistle through his missing teeth. “Work to do.”
“Is this Ryneal?” asks his master.
“Aye,” he says as he staggers away under his burden of root tubers, “and I would leave while you can.”
His master watches the man. “Come, Girton,” she says. “We must prepare.”
“Yes, Master.” He follows, leading Xus along by his rein.
“I have told you of justice, Girton,” she says as they come to stop in a copse just beyond the village, “and that justice was blinded by men.”
“Yes, Master.”
“But I did not tell you why.”
“No, Master.”
She takes a step forward. “Men blinded her so that they could lead her off the path. Sometimes we must be there to guide her.” She puts her finger on his chest. “Tonight you will walk the path with her.”
A sudden intake of breath.
“Me?”
Does the wind pick up? Do the trees sigh? Does the world momentarily brighten before cooling and darkening?
“Yes, Girton. You.”
“I don’t want to.” The words tumble from his mouth and leave something in his throat that clogs it up and makes tears start from his eyes. He knows he is letting her down but he’s seen her come back from her work: sometimes covered in blood, sometimes bruised, sometimes with a new cut that he will bind and clean and it will become another shining, pale line of damaged flesh on her skin. Even when she comes back unscathed there is always something missing. It is as if some piece of her is gone, leaving glassy, pale, damaged lines behind her eyes. “I don’t want to,” he says again. She puts her hands on his shoulders. She looks right into his eyes. She looks right into him.
“Good,” she says. “I would be worried if you wanted this. Sit with me a while.”