‘King, Thalia my beloved.’ He came over to the window beside her and kissed her. She smelled of honey and milk and fresh flowers, and he felt her wince at the reek of sour alcohol on his breath. You smell like a distillery. ‘He’ll make me king.’ So glorious, saying it to her.
It’s done, he thought, saying it. It’s done. Everything that’s happened … it’s done.
‘King?’
‘I knew he would.’ He laughed giddily, kissing her face. ‘Whatever I … I’ve done to him’ – a stumble in his speech, pain shooting through him, then he shook himself – ‘whatever I’ve done, he knows I’m the only way he can get what he wants. He was furious when … when Carin … when it happened, but this is what he’s been working towards all these years, after all. Power. Strength. His hand pulling my strings. His family ascendant, his enemies crushed in the dust. And so he’ll help me. Should have just asked directly, years ago, and spared us both some pain.’
‘King?’ she said again.
Marith went over to a table and poured himself a drink from the flagon waiting there. A toast to himself. Happiness welling up within him: All hail Marith Altrersyr, Ansikanderakesis Amrakane! ‘King. I’ll have my father butchered. Or keep him alive, locked up, in pain. And Tiothlyn … He’ll suffer, for taking my place. And that bitch his mother, and her kin …’ He gulped down the cup in one go, laughing. So much easier it all felt, now it was settled and done. Why had he kept running from it? Everything would be fine now. Fine and good. ‘I’ll wrap you in all the jewels in my father’s treasury, place the crown of Eltheia on your head. I’ll make every man, woman and child on the Whites grovel at your feet. And I’ll kill every person who was there when my father abandoned me. Hang their heads on Malth Elelane’s walls.’
‘King …’ Her eyes were very wide. ‘King …’
He smiled and kissed her face again. I love you. I do. And you love me. And everything will be fine now. It’s all so good! Looked where she had been looking, out over the green and gold walls down to the knife-grey sea. White horses racing, spray breaking on the dark rocks of Caltrean Head. Saleiot: to shine, to sparkle, to dance like the sunlight on fast-flowing water.
He went to pour himself another drink and then hesitated, frowning at himself. Half ashamed. No more. Not now. Not today. Today they would go out to the wild country, and he’d show her indeed the beauty of the White Isles, beauty and living and sunlight on hard frost. She should share them. The world’s such a beautiful place! he thought. He bathed and dressed hurriedly, forced himself to eat a little, ordered a horse fetched. The day cold and clear, washing the pain in his head away, riding fast into the wind while the gulls wheeled and shrieked above them.
Chapter Fifty
I do not like him, the way he was last night, so full of himself and his pride, so full of cruelty and hate. Selfish and vile. Self-pitying. Half-drowned in ceremony and status. Rather more than half-drowned in other things.
But then he takes me out into the wilds, riding fast with the wind in our faces. The land is hard with frost; his face shines and he reminds me of the frost. We go down to the sea and he rides the horse out into the waves and laughs when the water soaks the hem of my gown. The seabirds scream, and where last night they were terrible, the cries of things in pain, now they are poignant and lonely and catch my heart with grief. The most beautiful sound in the world, he says. They sound like the dragon’s eyes were as it lighted on the ground.
We sit on the beach, in the cold wind. He looks at me as he did in the desert, when we sat beneath the stars, when he told me his heart and wept for what he was and is and will be.
The landscape here is wild and strange like nothing I could imagine, bare rocks and barren trees and bitter cold, cold through to my bones, grey sea and grey sky and grey earth, pressing with life, calling despair. The sea! I could not conceive of it, he could not describe it, and now I see it it near breaks my heart. All my life behind high walls, dark enclosures or burning, blazing light, Great Tanis, who rules all things, but whose world is constrained to one building alone on the face of the earth. And now I am here in a place where the light is pale as water and the sky and the land and the sea go on forever.
We ride into the sea and the water splashes my skirts and I feel washed clean. Scoured by the wind and the water.
I could live here, I think. I could live here with him.
Chapter Fifty-One
In the cool sunshine of an autumn afternoon, they turned the horse away from the surf and rode inland, following a little muddy creek trickling its way through thick reed beds. Wild duck started up as they passed, and once a great white and black goose, honking mournfully. ‘Snowgoose,’ Marith said with satisfaction. ‘Means a hard winter.’ The sedge grew up almost as tall as a man, pressing in close around them with a hiss like whispers. They rode on a small raised track, thick old planks banked up over the creek. Another old road. Old as the keep. Old as the lich road. Older than dragon blood and black-red hair. Still and rotting, the land seemed in the frost. Heavy with bleak grey life. Another duck burst up, startled by their approach, wing beats vast in the still air. Then silence again save the whispering of the reeds.
After a while, when the sedge and the salt seemed to Thalia to become oppressive, they came to a fork in the narrow trackway, a meeting of ways, one running on up the creek towards the hills, the other turning off to the left towards a wood and dry ground. Marith paused the horse a moment, then took it left. Thalia breathed a little sigh of relief. These silent marshes: she thought with deep fear what they would be like at night. In the twilight, the between time. Between land and water, salt and earth. In her bed in the chambers of Malth Salene, she would not want to think of this place and that it was near.
The track they took led out of the marsh quickly enough, the wooden walkway giving way to solid beaten ground, the sedge to gorse and heather and thick coarse grass and small tangled trees bright with scarlet fruit. The way turned up and back towards the sea; they were coming to the tip of a low headland, where the cliff tumbled down in jumbled rocks to tiny coves.