‘You thought I knew? You didn’t think to mention it? Gods and fucking demons, Rate!’ Gods and demons and fuck. He’d thought the lad had some potential in him. Trusted him. Trusted Marith. What in all hells was bloody wrong with him suddenly? Put your life in your men’s hands, and this is what happened. Idiots.
Rate said again, ‘I thought you knew. Then I thought, with the plan and everything, I thought I must be wrong … I was never sure … You didn’t seem to think there was anything to worry about …’
‘How many hatha addicts do you think I’ve met, exactly, the kind of life I live? And how do you even come to know about this stuff, come to that?’
More embarrassed. ‘My, uh … my cousin farms it. Alongside the cows. Most of the people in my part of Chathe do. It’s not all rose trees and poets, Chathe. Several people in my village you’d think had bloody fleas, you didn’t know they were just dying slowly of hatha poisoning.’
Tobias sat with his mouth open. After a while he said faintly, ‘And you didn’t think to maybe mention this earlier? Like, before I gave him a purse bulging with gold? No?’
‘I thought you knew,’ Rate said yet again. ‘I thought I must be wrong. And I did try to say something. And it’s none of my business anyway. You’re in command, remember?’
‘Yes … Yes.’ They’d all been mad and blind and wrong, these last few days. The city, maybe. The golden light and the golden dust and the strange air. Or something in the city. Marith killing. Him trusting. Rate being a stupid useless bastard. Emit being dead. Nothing felt quite right here. Get the job done and get out quick, he thought. Not good for the mind, this place.
Said exhaustedly, ‘I’m in command. Yes. Thank you for reminding me of that. It’s my bloody fault, should have looked at him more closely.’ Skie should have told me, he thought savagely. Dangerous, keeping secrets like that from a man. You trusted your commander and he trusted you. Quickest way to die badly was to change that, in their line of work. ‘And now I apparently have a drug-addled, self-pitying drunk with the rarest bloodline in Irlast under my command. Or did you have your suspicions about that too?’
Rate stared at him. ‘Oh, come on. You actually believe him? That he’s … he’s … you know … All of that.’
‘Stupid as it sounds, I do.’ It sounded stupid even as Tobias said it. ‘We knew he was high-born: that’s so bloody obvious he might as well be dressed in cloth of gold with a crown on his head. He speaks right, he looks right … There are some very odd stories about goings-on on the Whites. Headed for death, people keep saying about the Altrersyr Prince. Which he probably is, after what we saw last night. Don’t tend to live long, firewine drinkers, one way or another. Somehow I’m guessing hatha eaters don’t either. And after what we saw last night, I’d be tempted to throw him out and tell people he was dead too, if he was heir to my bloody kingdom. He says Skie knows, and Skie isn’t fooled by things. And Skie’s being cagey about something, wants to go to the Whites but doesn’t want to talk about it, too. It all fits. Sort of …’ He sighed. ‘You saw him last night. Do you think he was lying?’
‘So … what are we going to do? What are you going to do?’
Run away screaming and hope I never see this place or any of you again in my bloody life. Hit something. Sit down, get drunk and have a good cry. ‘Nothing. Nothing I wouldn’t be going to do anyway. We have a job to do, and we’re doing it. Prince Marith signed up for this. A foot soldier under my command, that’s what he is. Does as I say or he’s punished for it. He’s going out with us now to buy the gear, if he lives through to the end of the contract he’ll be whipped for misconduct, then we decide what to do with him. Or Skie will, anyway. And until then we pretend we don’t know about Emit. Makes things a whole lot easier that way.’
‘And Alxine?’
‘We don’t tell Alxine anything. Not who Marith is, not what he’s done. If he works some of it out, fair enough. But otherwise, nothing. That makes things a whole lot easier too.’ Risky telling Rate. But he had to tell someone. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t just not tell. Went round and round his head and he wasn’t sure he wasn’t mad for believing a word of it. Needed to talk it out, get some reassurance he wasn’t. Say it.
He felt strangely humiliated, too, now he knew he’d had the descendent to Amrath the World Conqueror traipsing around after him digging the latrine trenches and making pots of near-on undrinkable tea.
Upstairs, Marith was thinking similar thoughts. He was a prisoner, now, he realized. They’d hardly let him go out without their supervision again. Whatever little freedom he had found was gone, he was caged in, now, by them and by himself. Tobias had taken back every last penny he’d had on him. And even if he had money, he couldn’t leave: he’d signed something that he was dimly aware had said he couldn’t leave on pain of death, and if he did, the only place to go was backwards, to where Skie had found him. Revulsion rose up in him at the thought of that.
A tap on the door. One of the women, bringing back his clothes, miraculously clean and sweet-smelling, even the coat almost as good as new. She looked at him with a disgusted expression on her face as he stood shaking and shivering, still half out of his mind.
He dressed slowly, came slowly down the stairs. His steps sounded very loud on the smooth wood. The other men were lounging awkwardly in the little courtyard garden, trying to find something to do with themselves. Birds flitted about in the corner where a plate of crumbs had been set out for them. He could hear women chattering and laughing, the clanging of cooking pots as someone began preparing a meal.
Three pairs of eyes turned to look at him. He tried to smile, the way he’d always smiled at people who’d seen him as he really was, the smile of someone so high and lordly he could afford not to care. There was bread on the table, and honey and cheese. He sat down and helped himself. All the while the three men sat and looked at him silently. What did he expect them to do, he thought, get down and kneel? Men had grovelled at his feet before now, prostrate in the dust when he told them his name. What would he do, how would he feel, if they did the same? Laugh, probably. He ate the bread in silence and felt better, though the taste was like ashes in his mouth.
Marith sat and looked at his plate and felt their eyes on him. Pity. Mockery. Disgust.
Memories came to him. Sunshine on high moorland. Grey rocks tumbling into a grey sea. Beech mast crunching beneath his horse’s hooves, the light green and gold through the first new spring leaves. Men kneeling before him, women eyeing him with longing, a whole world at his feet. Gilded and pampered and lording it over everyone. Ruined and screaming and crawling blind in the dark.
Oh yes, he thought, I know what I am and what I’ve given up. Sometimes I even wonder why.