So quickly my love came, like flowers.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked dully. His head spinning as he looked at her. She shied back, fear in her eyes. Oh, no. No, no, no. She couldn’t fear him. She couldn’t leave. He clutched her hand, afraid to stop touching her. A sudden horror filled him, that if he saw light in her face, she saw darkness in his.
‘I am Prince Marith Altrersyr,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I can help you.’ He saw her start at his name. Curse it. Curse himself. He had spoken in Pernish at first, unthinking, but switched to Literan, hoping it might reassure her. ‘I … I can help you. I want to help you. Are you hurt?’
‘They did not hurt me.’ She spoke Pernish back to him. Her voice soft and sweet with a heavy accent like thick honey. It made him shiver from head to foot. He held fast to her hand, warmth running into him from her skin, the light rising through her onto him. Everything was silent in his mind. Somewhere far away, things beat like wings.
‘I would have killed them, if they had.’ If she were harmed, he would search the city and kill everything living until he found them. But she did not seem to have been harmed.
Marith led her away from the alleyway down the street. A few people about, watching. A troop of soldiers went past and gave them a quick glance. She flinched from the watching eyes. She moved her body awkwardly, and he saw that her left arm was covered in scabs and scars from wrist to elbow, ugly and vile against her perfect skin.
‘You are hurt,’ he said, anger in his voice. Old wounds, slabby things that festered and did not heal, like his own hand. But it horrified him, that she should ever have been hurt. Linked them, both marked like that, and in almost the same place.
He was glad of his hurts, if it linked him to her. Almost glad of hers, if it gave him another moment to speak to her.
She cried out ‘No!’ and twisted away from him, trying to hide her arm. Her thin sleeveless grey dress was no cover at all for her, she could only try to tuck her arm behind her in such a way that it was more visible, for her trying to hide it. Her dress was dirty and ripped at the hem. Almost without thinking, Marith took off the cloak he was wearing and wrapped it around her, folding it over her to cover her arm.
The fear in her was clearing a little. She looked him up and down, taking in the pack on his shoulder and the water-skin at his belt. ‘You are leaving the city?’ she asked slowly.
Marith nodded. Rate was coming towards him, his face full of anger. They’d drag him away any moment now.
She looked hesitant. ‘If you are leaving the city, may I … may I accompany you? I …’ She blushed, looked at the ground. ‘I have nowhere to go and I … I need to get away. This is not a good place. And you … you have been kind …’
‘It would be my honour,’ he said, falling self-consciously into the court speak of his upbringing. A brave prince rescuing a lady, like a hero from a song. That was what he was, too. What he could be.
He turned to Rate and Alxine and Tobias, gathered around him grumbling. He smiled and he was a prince again and they would do as he commanded because he could not imagine they could do otherwise. ‘She will come with us,’ he said. ‘Come with me. Or I will kill you all. I swear it. On my blood and my name.’
A long pause. The girl stood looking from one to another, no longer afraid but with the light back in her face. She herself seemed now unsurprised that they would help her, four strange men with knives in their eyes. There was power in her. It radiated from her like the light. They would do as she wanted because she could not imagine they could do otherwise. She smiled at them.
‘This is insane,’ said Alxine. But he nodded. He had a kind heart, to help a woman in distress.
Rate didn’t say anything, but he looked at the girl’s face and her slender body in her thin dress.
And Tobias? Tobias didn’t have the strength left to argue.
The lordly voice, the voice that got in your head and made you obey it before you realized what you were even doing. Things in Marith’s face that said it probably wasn’t a good idea to argue. People were beginning to watch them with interest. Causing a scene. We really don’t want to cause a scene just now, Tobias thought. Just get out. Get out, and sort everything out later, when we’re safely away.
The girl was, he had to admit, almost breathtakingly beautiful. You could do a lot, a shameful part of him whispered, with a girl like that in tow. There was something in her face, too, that made him feel frightened of not helping her.
‘She is entirely your responsibility,’ Tobias hissed. ‘We don’t lift a finger to help her. She’s yours, you’re ours. Got it? You follow my orders, she follows you. And you don’t speak a word to each other that isn’t said loudly, and in Pernish. You even look at her like you’re plotting things, I kill her.’
Marith gave him a look, something unreadable, then turned his eyes back to the girl.
‘Come on then,’ Tobias said slowly. ‘Let’s get going.’
They walked on to the gates, the woman nervous, gazing about her and ahead of her. She flinched as they came to the soldiers waiting there. The gates were open, the city trying to pretend things were as normal. Things were as normal, almost. The Emperor hadn’t been murdered. Not in anybody’s interests to catch the men who hadn’t done it. Blame the Immish. Blame the dead. Blame the bloke who annoyed you a week last Lanethday by talking too loud. Blame demons and the dark. Just don’t even think to blame the men now running everything, and don’t even think to ask what anyone knows. The soldiers contemplated them uninterestedly and let them through.
And so Alxine and Rate and Tobias and the descendant of Amrath and the High Priestess of the Lord of Living and Dying walked together through the city gates into the desert, and nobody in all Sorlost even noticed them as they went.
Chapter Thirty-Three
They walked all day in the heat, slowly, two of the men limping, the third clutching his arm, stopping often to rest or drink. Only the dark-haired boy, Marith, did not seem tired. He walked close by her side, watching her with sidelong glances, his beautiful terrible eyes flickering over her face.
Thalia gazed at the country around her with disappointed awe. The vastness of it, the sprawl and stink and ugliness of it. The huge sky hazy blue overhead, the farmlands and villages spreading around. Sorlost had been terrifying beyond her imaginings, a chaos of shouting, dangerous, outside anything she could understand. The country she walked through now was worse, even, for she had never seen wide spaces, barren hills, empty sky. Her world had walls and boundaries and doors.