I found her where I’d first met her, in a little cottage on a road a mile or so outside of Aramor whose only distinction was that if you kept walking it long enough it just happened to lead all the way back to a small farm in Pertine where a foolish boy had once been born, had spent his childhood dreaming of Greatcoats, had met a girl and had, for a very short while, been happy.
‘I wondered when you’d come,’ Magrit Denezia said, though to me she would always be the Tailor. She led me inside and then sat heavily in the room’s only chair, content, apparently, for me to stand.
‘You might have been waiting a long time. I’d never imagined I’d live this long.’
She gave me that sour grin of hers. ‘Ah, that’s the thing about people like you and me, Falcio: our curse is to keep living, when those we love best die.’
‘Well, that cheered me right up,’ I said. I glanced around the small cottage and was surprised to see all of her books and furnishings arrayed around the room in a remarkably familiar configuration. ‘You realise you’ve recreated your cell in Aramor, don’t you?’
She waved a hand. ‘It suited me fine while I was there. Why go to the trouble of rethinking it all?’ She set down her sewing and rose from her chair. She walked, a little stiffly, I thought, to a set of coats hanging from a rack on the far side of her cell. ‘The black, I think,’ she said, taking one down. ‘It’s best for a journey such as this.’
I was going to ask how she knew why I’d come, but then she would have said, ‘I’m a Tailor, Falcio. I know where every thread starts and where it ends.’ And frankly, I wasn’t in the mood.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll need to walk back to the castle, but there will be a cart waiting for us there.’
She followed me out of the cottage and leaned a hand against my arm. ‘It’s kind of you to let me come.’
‘Paelis would have wanted me to bring you.’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ the Tailor said. ‘But thank you for pretending.’
*
Outside the gates of Aramor was a simple horse-cart with a seat at the front wide enough for two and a longer space in the back. The stable boys weren’t there and neither were the promised horses, but I wasn’t angry as the explanation for their absence stood in front of me, her wide muzzle nuzzling at the black silk that shrouded the body.
‘You decided to show up,’ I said.
Monster opened her mouth, revealing sharp teeth and a belly-full of rage. She neighed in that way of hers that always sounds more like the growl of a mountain cat than it does anything that should come from a horse.
‘Don’t pick fights,’ the Tailor said. ‘We have a long journey and it’ll be easier if you have both hands.’
It was a fair point, but more importantly, there was nothing I could say to Monster that didn’t apply equally well to myself. So I walked round to the long wooden bearing poles. ‘Come on then,’ I said to the Greathorse.
It’s hard to imagine a creature simultaneously so noble and belligerent. Monster was nearly twice the size of a normal horse and I had no doubt she could pull us all the way to Phan without breaking a sweat. What surprised me was her willingness. Monster was not an animal meant for service. Nonetheless she walked slowly towards the front of the cart and let me attach the breeching straps around her front, then to the poles. I didn’t bother with the bridle or the reins. She didn’t need them and wouldn’t have tolerated them.
‘Falcio,’ the Tailor said quietly, and when I turned to see what she wanted, she was pointing to the western edge of the castle grounds. There, peeking out from the trees, were a pair of large horses, their coats black as night itself. It took me a moment to realise that they weren’t grown horses at all, but foals who had no business being anywhere near that size. The sight of them took my breath away.
Greathorses.
I patted Monster on the neck. ‘Nicely done, old girl.’
She growled at me in response.
‘Give us a hand then,’ the Tailor said, lifting one foot onto the step of the cart.
I went up the other side and reached down to give her my arm for support until she was seated on the bench. ‘I don’t recall you ever needing help before.’
‘Misery wears on the body as it does the soul,’ she replied as Monster began pulling the cart down the long road that led out of Aramor. ‘I shouldn’t need to remind you of that.’
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
The Companion
Our journey took us north and east, up the winding trade route called the Bow. After almost a month on the road, I would have expected the body to be rotting, but whenever I removed the black cloth from Aline’s corpse she still lay there, perfectly white and perfectly still, like a porcelain doll.
‘That deathhouse keeper at Aramor did a good job with the preserving oils,’ the Tailor said.
I grunted something, my reply probably not an actual word.
At first we’d ridden in silence, neither of us being especially fond of the other these days and there being nothing to say. But sometimes grief demands sharing, and what started as the occasional snide remark about our mutual failure to protect the King’s daughter had, over the days and miles, become reminiscences and, eventually, stories. The early ones were those we both knew, mostly about King Paelis and his odd ways. After a while we each sought to find tales that the other hadn’t known – to elicit an unexpected laugh or tear.
Sometimes we grew so weary that one of us would repeat a story for the second, third, or even fourth time. The other always knew, but by unspoken mutual agreement we each pretended not to have heard it before. I talked a lot about the King – about the early days, when he and I roved around the country on horseback looking for new Greatcoats to recruit. The Tailor would remind me that the King was a terrible rider and that I was lying atrociously about his skills.
For her part, the Tailor would recount the events of Aline’s girlhood, tales of her fierce intellect and bold ways when confronting every petty injustice done to a servant or anyone less fortunate than herself. We would both pretend that this was the Aline we had brought to Aramor with us, rather than the broken, sometimes child-like creature we’d tried to put on the throne, the girl who had overcome those tragedies only to sacrifice herself for the kingdom.
‘Filian is your grandson,’ I said, one evening as we rode past the northern border of Domaris into the Duchy of Pulnam.
‘Thanks for clearing that up,’ the Tailor replied, biting on a piece of the mercilessly tough and ridiculously expensive dried beef we’d splurged on the day before.
‘I mean . . . don’t you want to . . . I don’t know. Support him? Get to know him?’
She handed me the last of the beef. ‘And what will I find in him?’ She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her coat. ‘If he’s like Patriana I’ll want to kill him and if he’s like Paelis I’ll want to kill myself.’
‘Rage or sorrow,’ I said. ‘Is that all that’s left to us?’
‘It’ll be all right, Falcio. The sun will keep shining.’ She patted a patronising hand against my arm but then, curiously, left it there. Perhaps even more curiously, I was glad she did.
I suppose there was no choice left but to admit that I loved the old woman.