Marith sighed and shifted himself around, trying to get comfortable. The horse snorted again.
Landra swept into the courtyard, her face set hard. She glanced over at Marith, still struggling with the horse, and her lips curled. Her own horse was black, beautifully saddled in rich dark colours, its mane tied with ribbons, bronze ornaments on its head. Her cloak was the brilliant deep green and gold of her family, embroidered in a pattern of swirling flowers. The colours stood out vivid against the glossy black. Beneath it, she wore a travelling dress of dark grey velvet, gold thread work snaking around her breasts and waist.
Thalia should wear a dress like that, a cloak like that.
Marith’s horse snorted, the saddle shifting nastily. The party began to move forwards, two armed men in front, then Landra and her two women, three servants leading packhorses, then another three men, Marith in their midst. Thalia let out a cry of terror as the horse she was on started moving. The man she was mounted with cursed and struck her and she cried out again, making the horse shy.
‘You shut your mouth,’ the man shouted. He yanked the bridle hard: the horse shied again, skittered sideways. Thalia swayed in the saddle, crying out and weeping; the man let loose his grip on her and she almost fell, screaming in fear.
‘Whoopsa!’ Pulled her upright, repeated the trick to the other side. The horse reared up, its hooves treading air, then kicked back, and he almost let go of her again. The men around them cheered. Landra watched impassively, her eyes far away.
‘Don’t you go falling off there then, girl.’ The man squeezed her breasts and Marith heard her choke out a cry. ‘Want me to hold you nice and tight now, do you?’
Mandle grinned at Marith, closing his hand on his arm, nudging the horses ever closer together. ‘He’ll do worse than kill her, Prince Ruin. So you do as you’re told.’ He raised his voice. ‘That’s enough, Jaerl. Don’t want your horse wearing itself out.’
They rode out through the streets of Reneneth, stinking of rot and rubbish, heavy with flies and filth. The crumbled buildings looked leprous, raddled and eaten away, green and rank with mould. Walls bulged like abscessed wounds. Sickness and death. Sickness and death. I looked forward to reaching this place, Marith thought slowly, trotting on his broken-down horse. I thought there would be freedom here.
Let the fires come. Let the fires come to burn it clean. Faces watched as they passed, this procession of wealth and power and pain. Die, he thought. Every single one of you. Every single one of you who sees me here like this. I’ll kill you all. Kill you all and hang your corpses up for the crows, I swear it. On my name and my blood, I swear it. He rubbed at his eyes and wished he was back in the wagon, drugged and uncaring and at peace.
All morning they rode in the hot sunshine. Cooler than the desert, no longer the same dry, desiccating air, but hot and wearing, on a bad horse with no water. The guards passed water-skins among themselves but did not offer them to Marith or Thalia.
The landscape was richer than the country around Sorlost, trees and flowers, fields of crops, orchards growing small wizened apples and glossy black cimma fruit. Goats ran everywhere, bells on their necks clanking; there were cows too, thin and dark-eyed with great heavy horns and grotesquely dangling throats. Little shrines at the roadside: they had left the rule of Great Tanis and come into the domain of smaller deities, the old bitter blind gods of the human world. Jaerl spat for luck as they passed one, a grey hump of rock, formless, but with a gaping mouth like a frog. Flowers had been laid before it, withered now and skeletal.
Around noon they stopped, the women sliding off their horses, chattering excitedly, the servants hurrying to spread rugs, prepare drinks and food. The land around was scrubby woodland, no houses or even chimney smoke visible; they had stopped at the bottom of a shallow incline, where a stream flowed lazily among willow trees. There was a scent of mint, and a brackishness from the water over it, rancid-sweet. Marith looked at the water and the willow trees and saw Thalia looking back at him, eyes filled with pain.
One brief moment of his life, brilliant as birdsong. Only a few days, since he had last sat beneath a willow tree beside a stream.
Mandle jerked his arm, pointing at a patch of rough ground away from the women, where the men sat with drawn swords. ‘Dismount, Prince Ruin. Sit down on that stone and don’t move.’ He fingered the hilt of his own sword, a shining thing of yellowed metal, green enamel on the hilt. ‘Don’t speak, either.’
Jaerl pulled Thalia down and pushed her to sitting a little way away from him. She moved stiffly, hunched and bent over, shaking. She looked like the little grey hump of rock they had passed that was a god. Formless. Worn to nothing. Empty.
‘I said, want a drink, Prince Ruin?’ Marith blinked, the sunlight hurting his eyes. Mandle’s face swam before him. He reached up gratefully, took the skin the man offered, taking a long drink.
Not water. Spirits of some kind, strong and harsh. He gulped it down, tears streaming down his face. When they came to remount he staggered, barely able to stand, fell in the dust and lay there dizzy until they hauled him up. Sat slumped in his saddle, face lolling forward into the horse’s filthy, matted mane. The men laughed at him, the sound swirling around him like bells.
By the time they stopped again he had sobered a bit, his mouth tasting filthy, bile in his throat. He almost fell from his horse, begged for water in a cracked voice, then begged for more of whatever they’d given him before. They laughed at him again and refused. And then he was remounted, and they were going on, and evening was coming, the first stars visible in the deep blue of the sky.
They stopped for the night in another caravan inn, smaller than that in Reneneth but better kept, cleaner with a smell of warm brick and horse manure rather than decay and rotted stone. Lamps flickered in the doorway. A plump young innkeep’s wife, pinkcheeked and smiling, her smile fading as Marith and Thalia were hurried past her up creaking stairs into a room at the very top of the house.
‘Don’t want no trouble,’ Marith heard her protest in the strong, ugly accent of Immish.
‘And you’ll get none, you shut your mouth and close your eyes,’ someone growled back. Then Mandle’s voice, kinder and softer, lilting with its Whites accent that made Marith almost weep: ‘They’ll be no trouble, mistress. A bad thing, he is. Just leave him be. Leave them both be.’