Marith made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sigh. He must have heard the exhaustion in her voice, for he carefully helped her to her feet and led her back to the low campfire flames where the three men sat. They had been watching them, she thought.
Marith took off his jacket, laid it on the ground for her. ‘You’ll be too cold,’ she said faintly, but she was so tired. She lay down on his jacket wrapped in his cloak and fell asleep, even with the cold and the hard ground and the men sitting around her. Marith lay down a little way away from her, face turned to the dark.
Grey dawn light, pink and gold streaking the sky in the east. Birds calling, a desert fox shrieking with a harsh cry, the scream of a hawk high in the thin air.
Thalia woke from fitful sleep to noises she had never known, cold like she had never felt. Not the death cold of the Small Chamber, but the cold of a world alive and living and brilliant with life. She sat up, pulling Marith’s cloak about her shoulders. Her eyes were dirty and gritty, her hair an itchy tangle, her throat dry, her body stiff and sore. But the beauty of the world awakening caught in her throat and made her gaze around her with wide, astonished eyes.
Marith was sitting staring into the ashes of the fire. His face was pinched, his lips almost blue from cold. His body in his rough shirt looked thin and crushed. He must be half-frozen, Thalia realized, dressed only in his shirt. He looked up at her as she sat up and his face brightened, the weariness and the cold going out of it. He smiled softly at her.
‘I’ve never heard birdsong like this,’ Thalia said awkwardly, wanting something to say between them. It seemed half-natural as breathing, half-fearful as facing the men in the Temple come to kill her, looking at him and talking to him. ‘I’ve never … I’ve never seen dawn light like this. It’s so beautiful.’
‘You should see the sun rise over the winter sea,’ Marith said. ‘Or over a meadow in hoarfrost. You should hear birdsong in an oak forest on a midsummer morning.’ He smiled again. ‘You should see your face with the sun catching in your eyes.’
Thalia blushed and looked away.
‘I’ll build up the fire,’ he said. ‘The … the others will be waking. They’ll want to get on.’ He shivered in the cold. Thalia started up, handed him his jacket, trying to shake the dust out of it. He took it carefully, thanking her almost reverentially. How strange he is, she thought. He walked a little way beneath the trees, gathering up more sticks. He rubbed at his face as he did so, and she saw his body shake again, twitching as if in pain. So men had twitched beneath the point of her knife.
‘Lord Prince!’ A hoarse, angry voice: Tobias was standing watching Marith. Marith started, his shoulders slumping. Tobias waved at him. ‘Don’t go too far, remember, boy? Not where I can’t see you.’
He is their prisoner, perhaps, Thalia thought. But then if he was their prisoner why had they allowed him to bring her with them? What was going on between these four men was a mystery to her which she understood clearly she could not ask any of them to explain.
Marith returned with an armful of sticks and built up the fire.
‘Too much smoke,’ Tobias muttered, but he saw Marith shivering and said nothing more. Rate made tea again, offered Thalia a cup though it meant going without himself. She thanked him as she took it, the first words she had exchanged with him. He smiled at her kindly enough. Rate snorted at the exchange.
There was hard bread again, and dried meat, and dried fruit. Marith divided his carefully with Thalia, offering her far more than he kept for himself. She pressed food back on him, and his face shone. He, a prince, a descendant of the World Conqueror, a man with a sword at his hip and the marks of battle on his hands and face, he seemed to feel the thanks of the woman he had rescued from a dirty alley were so far above him he must tremble if she looked at him.
Rate rolled his eyes at the way Marith was with her, and she felt something unspoken pass between the four men. Marith did not speak to her again for a while, sitting hunched in silence eating the bread she had given back to him, eyes down in the dust.
After they had eaten and washed themselves in the stream they set off again, walking slowly through the scrub. The men were more tired than they had been the day before, their faces greyer, more creased with pain. Tobias and Rate’s limps were worse, Alxine’s left arm held stiffly by his side. Thalia felt it also, the ache in her body from sleeping on cold, hard ground, the weariness and hunger after the long day’s walk and knowing there was no resting. Her feet were sore and blistered in her thin soft shoes and she, too, began to limp. It began to occur to her, in her new-born na?vety, to wonder where they had got their injuries, and why they carried swords, and why they were leaving the city for the wilds.
Marith saw her limping and came over to her. His face was haggard, scratches around his eyes. And yet there was a brightness in him that grew as he walked, so that he seemed stronger than the others, healthier, happier. He took her arm; after a while, as she was tired, he put his arm around her to take her weight onto him, half carrying her along.
‘Tobias has … has some money he owes me,’ he said after a while. ‘We’ll have to go into a village today, we need proper supplies. We can buy you clothes and shoes and things there, perhaps. Horses even. It’s too long a journey on foot. Wherever it is.’
Thalia nodded, intent on the walking. The other men were watching and listening; she did not like it. She had tried to talk to him in Literan, so they could not overhear, but he had glanced at Tobias before answering her in Pernish, more loudly than before.
‘Why are you leaving?’ she asked. ‘Where are you going?’ Why are you here? she almost said. But she could not ask him that, the words dried on her tongue.
A silence. The rough tramp of their footsteps on the grit and pebbles they walked on, the laboured sound of her breathing, weary in the heat.
‘We … did things,’ Marith said at last. ‘I don’t want to talk about it … I … We …’
‘You were part of the attack on the palace. Weren’t you?’