Chapter Forty-Nine
Marith looked around the courtyard slowly, then dismounted and helped Thalia slide down into his arms. She shivered at his embrace, then pressed herself against him. I don’t know, she thought, I don’t know what to do. Do I even want to stay with him, now? She yawned in exhaustion. The warm windows looked so inviting. There was a smell of wood smoke in the air. Tonight, she thought, I do.
‘Deneth not coming to greet me in person, then?’ Marith said with his boy’s grin. ‘No, no, it’s late, no one knew quite when I’d arrive, he would hardly be waiting out here half the night in the cold by the midden heap. Of course I understand, he’ll see me in the morning when I’m clean and presentable, and spare us both the indignity of having to talk to me in the rags his daughter dressed me in.’
‘We have your chamber prepared—’ Aris Relast looked for a moment at Thalia, his eyebrows raised, something questioning between him and Marith ‘—baths, food, hot wine will be ready shortly. If you will follow me, My Lord?’
‘I think I probably know where I’m going. Could get there blind. Have done repeatedly, in fact.’ Marith took Thalia’s arm and led her through a small doorway into the bulk of the building itself, down a small corridor which opened out into a wide hall, brightly lit with torches, and then up a wide flight of stairs. Aris Relast followed behind them, flicking wide-eyed, panicked servants out of their way with a frown and a wave of his hand. Thalia gazed at it all in exhausted confusion. A world so different to her own. Bare polished stone on the floor, green and gold panels on the walls painted with a blazon of suns. Wall sconces of verdigrised copper. Oppressive, she found it.
At the top of the stairs, another hallway, stone walls hung with tapestries depicting pastoral scenes, lords and ladies in shining dresses hunting or dancing in green woodlands, a feast spread in a meadow carpeted with flowers. Marith stopped and looked at one for a moment. It showed a group of young men out hunting, counting up their kills. Two men rode slightly apart, their faces turned away from the rest, the necks of their horses close together like swans’ necks.
More stairs, a spiral staircase with a banister of carved wood. Marith laughed a little as they climbed it. Another hallway, a carved door. ‘This one, I assume?’ he said lightly. Avis Relast nodded. Marith reached out to open the door, his hand pausing a moment then the door pushing open. He made a noise that might have been a laugh, or a sigh, or a murmur of pain.
A grand suite of rooms. Richly furnished. The bedroom itself was large and striking, dominated by a great bed hung with red cloth. Marith strode over to a painted chest and threw it open, revealing a mass of dark clothing neatly folded, smelling of herbs.
‘Still here.’ He laughed again. ‘You didn’t burn them, then? Everything as I left it, my clothes, my chamber, even after I’ve been dead all these months.’
He looked around the room again, his eyes very wide, and Thalia looked and saw the ghosts of two young men looking back at him. She shuddered, and he shuddered too, and shook his head.
‘I need a drink. Something to eat. A hot bath.’ He gestured to Aris. ‘See to it.’
Aris left, bowing his head and muttering ‘My Lord Prince’ again as he went. So strange, it sounded. Marith sat down on the bed and Thalia joined him. Soft. Comfortable. She hadn’t slept in a comfortable bed for a long time. Tiredness overwhelmed her, thundering in her eyes. She sank into Marith’s shoulder, exhausted. Hard even to understand what they said, in their fast soft lilting Pernish, her mind so stunned with it all.
‘Don’t fall asleep yet, beautiful girl,’ Marith said softly in Literan. Safe and familiar. Thalia smiled half-asleep.
‘All I want is to sleep,’ she whispered back.
Too tired to eat or drink, when servants brought pastries and fruit and cold meat and hot, spiced wine. But she stirred herself when they were escorted down the hallway to a room equipped for bathing. The hot water made her even sleepier: she collapsed into bed afterwards, clean and warm and sweet-scented, safe in Marith’s arms. In the silence as she fell asleep she could hear the sea, far off. And another sound, that might have been two young men talking together quietly.
She saw the next day, in the light, the size and glory of the place, that Marith had not been wrong to call it beautiful, though it was a beauty strange to her. It was a high, windswept tower, carved in white-grey stone. Outside, a wall enclosed a wide area of gardens and orchards and meadow grass, running in places right to the edge of a cliff falling off sheer into the sea. The wall was painted green and gold, the Relast colours. A well-made road, paved in the same pale stone as the keep, ran down to the town below that sat hugging the water, a jumble of dark roofs. Ships floated in the harbour in a blaze of sails: one, she guessed, must be the ship they had sailed in, whose captain had spared them several more days’ pain by running as fast as he could for Malth Salene and its lord.
‘What does the name mean?’ she asked Marith over what passed for breakfast, eaten well after noon when they had finally woken from exhausted sleep. ‘Malth Salene? I’ve never heard the word Salene before. It doesn’t sound Pernish. But it’s not Literan or Immish.’
He frowned a little. He had not looked happy since he woke, for all he seemed more rested and comfortable. ‘It’s Itheralik. Saleiot means “to shine” or “to sparkle”. “To dance like the sunlight on fast-flowing water”, perhaps. So Malth Salene: the Tower of the Shining Sea. It’s an old word. An old name. Older than the Relast family, as the tower is older than they are. As old as the lich roads.’ A look of pain again in his face that she could not understand; he itched at his eyes impatiently, turned his face away from the water that did indeed shine beyond the walls.
‘The lich roads … The dead do indeed walk there, I think,’ said Thalia. ‘It is good that they came for us, took us away. I would not have wanted to stay longer on that road.’
Marith raised his head sharply. ‘The dead …?’ He frowned again. ‘It is not only the dead who walk there, beautiful girl. The things that walk there—’