Would this, too, become tedious, having to be flanked everywhere by armed men, trapped by the idea of others doing to him what he had done to others? He had raised the possibility in people’s minds again, after these long years of peace. Conspiracy and murder.
The twilight bell sounded. A sacrifice night again. That poor child. The city held rigid, breathing in the silence of a man’s death. Then the spell broke, the moment of danger passed. Across the square a sudden commotion: a woman, young and ragged, falling into the dust, not rising again. Someone shouting. Orhan’s men drew closer around him, swords out. Orhan sent one over to investigate. He came back shaking his head: just another street girl, dropping dead of something vile. Unlucky omen, Orhan thought, for her to have fallen there. It was the Court of the Broken Knife that usually claimed them. A better place to die. The Court of the Fountain was for the living, and those who died for glory.
I’d better take care not to die there, then, he thought.
‘Send someone to clear away the body,’ Orhan ordered. No one else would bother, not a corpse with nothing worth taking to make it worth the while. He did not like to see it there, in the beautiful square with the fountain playing and the lamplight bright.
When he got home, Bil was sitting in the inner courtyard, eating grapes and watching the ferfews chasing moths. In the gloom her hair blazed. She was dressed in yellow and green, like flowers, a loose dress to cover her growing belly.
‘You’re working too hard,’ she said. ‘You’ll be worn out.’
‘I enjoy it.’
She sat up, almost took his arm. She’d heard what he had had proclaimed today, then. Of course she had. But he had somehow hoped she might not have heard. Closed herself off into baby things. It repelled him, her swelling belly and her knowing this.
She said, ‘Will you really burn Samerna Rhyl alive?’
‘It has to be done.’
‘Burn Samerna? Burn the children alive?’
Even to his own wife, he could not risk telling the truth. Even to his own wife, he would be the man who killed them, who burnt them. No one could ever know he’d spared them. Of all the things he had done and all the reasons for doing them, those around him would condemn him for this above all. And he wouldn’t even have actually done it.
Just killed someone else’s family instead, to make his own conscience slightly easier to bear. Nothing important, on top of all the rest. But bitter.
‘It would have been me,’ Bil said. ‘If you’d failed.’
‘It still could be.’
‘You can’t … you can’t pardon them?’
Wearily: ‘No.’
‘But they didn’t do anything. It’s cruel.’
Wearily: ‘Yes.’
She looked at the walls. ‘When?’
‘Next week. Tearday. You’ll need to be there. We all will.’
She seemed about to speak, then nodded silently.
A servant called them in to a late dinner. Roasted lamb dressed with honey, warm bread, cold greens cooked with onions. Orhan ate absently, planning the work he needed to do tomorrow. Letters to Chathe and Tarboran. Ith. The White Isles. Elis’s wedding. That needed doing fast, to bind March to them. Before Elis mucked it up and the girl refused him. And his nephew: pity the poor bride there, too.
After they had eaten, Orhan wondered about going to see Darath. Or even going back to the palace, work again at the endless tasks. He went out into the gardens, looked up at the sky. Ferfews called around him. Ghost birds. Souls of the dead. The dead had no souls. But if they did, they were here, with him, calling in sweet low voices. The scent of jasmine was very strong. He’d finally got the stink of blood and burning out of his mind. Smell it again, in a few days’ time, when women and children and a roomful of servants died.
I did it for the good of the Empire, he thought heavily. One day everything will rise again, the people happy and triumphant, the gold pennants of the city catching the wind, the kings of Irlast bowing down before us. Hope and power and new purpose. I will remake the world, or a small part of it at least. I will be praised, afterwards.
Clouds came again, blotting out the moon. No stars apart from the red gleam of the Fire Star. The call of the birds in sweet low voices. Ghosts.
Orhan went into the house and up into his bedroom, and tried to sleep. All he could think of was the proclamation he had had made and the next things he needed to do. He woke early, went down to the palace and sat with the maps and the ledgers and the letters, planning changes, planning improvements. Fewer children starving. Fewer women dying unmourned in the street. Hope and power and new purpose. The good of the Empire. Written down in gold ink in books bound with human skin.
Chapter Forty-Eight
They were dragged up on deck, blinking at the light. Marith stared around him shakily. The great golden cliffs of Third loomed before them, crested at the top with the brown of raw, turned earth. The morning sun blazed on the peak of Calen Mon, picking out the birds circling it. A jagged ravine broke the line of the cliffs below the mountain, darker rocks running with water and deep green vegetation, goats picking over the sheer falls. To the north of the peak, woodland, sweeping down to meet the sea in low cliffs and a little shingle beach. The trees were almost bare now. Like bones. Seals lay on the beach, their dogs’ heads raised, watching. A few fishing boats bobbed on the choppy water, sails red or pale blue.
Landra appeared on deck, wrapped in a heavy fur-trimmed cloak against the cold wind. Her hair was braided with gold, though her clothes were creased and crumpled after weeks at sea. Her eyes looked tired as she gazed out at the land rising before them.
‘Home. I thought you might like to see it, Prince Ruin.’
Marith nodded slowly. The most beautiful place in the world. He felt Thalia shiver beside him, staring at the water and the cliffs. The first time they’d been allowed out of a filthy compartment in the hold for two weeks. The sky and the light were painful, the air stank of sweet cleanliness. She looked half-frozen in her thin dirty gown. The wind whipped her hair, made it fly out around her. Black fire, burning. Bare branches tearing at the sky. I said I’d show you my home, he thought. And so we’ll die there. Better than living, perhaps, knowing what will come to me. And better here than anywhere else.
‘Where are we making land?’ he asked Landra. ‘Escral? Or Toreth?’ To see Malth Salene again, rising above the dark waters of Torlan Bay, its walls painted green and gold, apple trees crowning the headland upon which it stood …