‘My Lords, please,’ Deneth said weakly. Very far away, his voice sounded. Distant as stars.
Marith opened his eyes again. Carlan blinked and jerked his head. Very cold in the room. The seabirds screamed, louder and louder. Death! Death! Death! He got up and walked over to Carlan, his hand on his dagger. Drew his dagger, stared into Carlan’s face. Cut Carlan’s throat in a great spray of scarlet blood. So cold in the room that the blood froze, tiny droplets clicking onto the smooth oak floor.
‘You would appear to have burnt my bridges for me, My Lord Prince,’ Deneth said at last. His face was very white. His voice shook. ‘Rather definitively.’
‘My father’s troops can’t be more than a few days behind him anyway. Waiting just off-shore, even. Whatever was said here tonight would have made no difference. Even my head on a stick. You pushed him to it when you had him abandon me.’ Marith gave the corpse a push, so that it fell with a hard thump to the floor. Ice crystals crunched underfoot. He felt absolutely sure, absolutely certain. Could see, clear as if it stood before him, how things were and would be. ‘You’ll be dead soon enough, I should think, one way or another. And I’ll be king.’
Deneth took a deep, long breath. For a moment, Marith wondered if the man would be fool enough to try to kill him. He bent down, gathered a handful of Carlan’s blood, poured two cups of brandy, divided the frozen drops between them, gave one to Deneth. ‘Death and all demons, Lord Relast. You agreed to back me.’ The shadows clawed at the walls. He smiled. Deneth drank slowly. Bent and knelt at his feet.
Marith did not sleep that night. He walked down onto the beach, out onto the moor, stood by the stones that marked the lich road and looked up at the night. The weather was changing, clouds coming in blocking out the stars. Ragged across the sky, great reaching, tearing hands dark beyond dark. Like the cloud was the edge of the world, the stars beyond a crack from which all the life was pouring out.
No longer frightening. Nothing was frightening now. Marith walked the walls of the fortress, paced the corridors and halls.
In the grey light of dawn he came back into his chambers. In the bedchamber Thalia lay asleep, her face crumpled and strained. A few beech leaves were scattered on the floor by the bed. Marith sat down and looked at her. Her hair hung across the pillows like a stream of black water. She was wrapped heavily in the blankets, hunched with cold. But her left arm showed. Her scars. Like writing, she had said one night when he had pressed his face against them, kissed them one by one, held his own marred left hand beside them. Writing that told her guilt and her power in jagged marks on her perfect, luminous skin.
It can’t be stopped. Can’t be undone. It’s too late. He kissed her hair, took a bottle from the sideboard, went out. He walked back through the doors of the keep into the gardens. Over to the edge of the cliff, where a small mound rose, bare earth still being reclaimed by the grass and the moss. A rough stone at its top, carved with the crude image of a horse. A very old stone, far, far older than the grave it marked.
The clouds were thicker, sea mist and drizzle. The sky was lighter now, almost full morning, but the sun was hidden. The sea the colour of a drawn sword.
In the court of kings he was victorious,
Fair-haired, fair-mannered,
Horse tamer,
Gold wearer,
Strong young tree branch,
Fierce to his enemies, kind to his friends.
No man can say of him,
That he did not fight his share or give it.
No man can say of him,
That he did not deserve his renown.
The old songs, the laments for dead heroes. We drink and fight and kill and die.
What would Carin think of this? he wondered. Laugh? Weep? Try to kill him in his turn, to stop it? Ride out beside him, hating him but loyal to the end of everything? Nod, and smile, and look at him in silence? Shake his head, and say he’d always known?
The wind blew a cold squall of spray into his face. He poured some of the contents of the bottle onto the earth of the grave. He sat down leaning against the headstone and drank the rest in long, leisurely mouthfuls.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Fire and smoke. Fire and blood. Over and over, endless. The smell was coming into Orhan’s dreams, there in his bedroom, his dining room, when he was taking a piss. Smelled it last night in Darath’s arms, fucking him and suddenly cold with the sick stench of burning.
Bil had talked about a taste in her mouth, a smell in her breath, caused by the child within her. Common, she said, in pregnant women. Meant a healthy child, more likely a boy. Meant good.
The roof of Tam’s house collapsed in a shower of sparks, wild dancing like Year’s Heart magery. A great gout of smoke went up. A few ragged cheers. A beautiful building, the House of the Sun in Shadow. Gold columns and white marble, a window of mage glass in green and deep blue. Roses in pots on the balconies, the central courtyard a grove of magnolia and cherry trees with a little pool lined in black china to make the water as dark and cool as sleep. He’d been to parties there. Sucked Darath’s cock there, on one memorable occasion.
A crash and the windows of the upper floor fell in, sending several large pieces of burning timber down. More cheers, mixed with a few screams. He should probably have some soldiers sent over here. Someone was going to get hurt.
Someone had, of course, already been hurt. Several someones, in fact. Orhan had been sure he could hear them screaming, for a while, even over the roar of the flames. One middle-aged woman. A girl of marriageable age, a boy a few years younger. A very old man. Nobody anyone would miss. Beggars. Street whores. Hatha addicts. Daughters and sons and mothers and lovers. And then the servants and the bondsmen and the hangers-on and Tam’s boy and a couple of people whose names got dragged in because, well, just because …
Ultimately, he’d killed every single one of them.
He could blame Tam. Darath did. He’d betrayed them, and had surely planned to do the same to them. Orhan and Bil and Darath and Elis and Elis’s myriad mistresses and the boy Darath had been screwing last month. All of them, burning. Would Tam have felt guilt about it? Cared?
Probably yes, Orhan thought, watching the flames. Tam wasn’t a monster, any more than he was. The law was the law. He didn’t want any of this to happen. It just had to be done.
The worst thing he’d ever done. Though possibly not the worst thing he would ever do.