"Unlike your brother. I stabbed him through his throat then threw him out of the window." The sharp knobble in Foscar's neck bobbed up and down as he swallowed. "I had Mauthis poisoned. Ganmark run through with a ton of bronze. Faithful's stabbed, slashed, drowned and hung from a waterwheel. Still turning on it, for all I know. Gobba was lucky. I only smashed his hands, and his knees, and his skull to bonemeal with a hammer." The list gave her grim nausea rather than grim satisfaction, but she forced her way through it. "Of the seven men who were in that room when they murdered Benna, there's just your father left." She slid the Calvez from its sheath, the gentle scraping of the blade as ugly as a child's scream. "Your father… and you."
The room was close, stale. Friendly's face was empty as a corpse's. Shivers leaned back against the wall beside her, arms folded, grinning.
"I understand." Foscar came closer. Small, unwilling steps, but towards her still. He stopped no more than a stride away, and sank to his knees. Awkwardly, since his hands were tied behind him. The whole time his eyes were on hers. "I'm sorry."
"You're fucking sorry?" she squeezed through gritted teeth.
"I didn't know what was going to happen! I loved Benna!" His lip trembled, a tear ran down the side of his face. Fear, or guilt, or both. "Your brother was like… a brother to me. I would never have wanted… that, for either of you. I'm sorry… for my part in it." He'd had no part in it. She knew that. "I just… I want to live!"
"So did Benna."
"Please." More tears trickled, leaving glistening trails down his cheeks. "I just want to live."
Her stomach churned, acid burning her throat and washing up into her watering mouth. Do it. She'd come all this way to do it, suffered all this and made all those others suffer just so she could do it. Her brother would have had no doubts, not then. She could almost hear his voice.
Do what you have to. Conscience is an excuse. Mercy and cowardice are the same.
It was time to do it. He had to die.
Do it now.
But her stiff arm seemed to weigh a thousand tons. She stared at Foscar's ashen face. His big, wide, helpless eyes. Something about him reminded her of Benna. When he was young. Before Caprile, before Sweet Pines, before they betrayed Cosca, before they joined up with the Thousand Swords, even. When she'd wanted just to make things grow. Long ago, that boy laughing in the wheat.
The point of the Calvez wobbled, dropped, tapped against the floor.
Foscar took a long, shuddering breath, closed his eyes, then opened them again, wet glistening in the corners. "Thank you. I always knew you had a heart… whatever they said. Thank—"
Shivers' big fist crunched into his face and knocked him on his back, blood bubbling from his broken nose. He got out a shocked splutter before the Northman was on top of him, hands closing tight around his throat.
"You want to fucking live, eh?" hissed Shivers, teeth bared in a snarling grin, the sinews squirming in his forearms as he squeezed tighter and tighter. Foscar kicked helplessly, struggled silently, twisted his shoulders, face turning pink, then red, then purple. Shivers dragged up Foscar's head with both his hands, lifted it towards him, close enough to kiss, almost, then rammed it down against the stone flags with a sharp crack. Foscar's boots jerked, the chain between them rattling. Shivers worked his head to one side then the other as he shifted his hands around Foscar's neck for a better grip, tendons standing stark from their scabbed backs. He dragged him up again, no hurry, and rammed his head back down with a dull crunch. Foscar's tongue lolled out, one eyelid flickering, black blood creeping down from his hairline.
Shivers growled something in Northern, words she couldn't understand, lifted Foscar's head, smashed it down with all the care of a stonemason getting the details right. Again, and again. Monza watched, her mouth half-open, still holding weakly onto her sword, doing nothing. Not sure what she could do, or should do. Whether to stop him or help him. Blood dashed the rendered walls and the stone flags in spots and spatters. Over the pop and crackle of shattering bone she could hear a voice. Benna's voice, she thought for a minute, still whispering at her to do it. Then she realised it was Friendly, calmly counting the number of times Foscar's skull had been smashed into the stones. He got up to eleven.
Shivers lifted the prince's mangled head once more, hair all matted glistening black, then he blinked, and let it drop.
"Reckon that's got it." He came slowly up to standing, one boot planted on either side of Foscar's corpse. "Heh." He looked at his hands, looked around for something to wipe them on, ended up rubbing them together, smearing black streaks of blood dry brown to his elbows. "One more to the good." He looked sideways at her with his one eye, corner of his mouth curled up in a sick smile. "Six out o' seven, eh, Monza?"
"Six and one," Friendly grunted to himself.
"All turning out just like you hoped."
She stared down at Foscar, flattened head twisted sideways, crossed eyes goggling up at the wall, blood spreading out across the stone floor in a black puddle from his broken skull. Her voice seemed to come from a long way off, reedy thin. "Why did you—"
"Why not?" whispered Shivers, coming close. She saw her own pale, scabbed, pinched-in face reflected, bent and twisted in that dead metal ball of an eye. "What we came here for, ain't it? What we fought for all the day, down in the mud? I thought you was all for never turning back? Mercy and cowardice the same and all that hard talk you gave me. By the dead, Chief." He grinned, the mass of scar across his face squirming and puckering, his good cheek all dotted with red. "I could almost swear you ain't half the evil bitch you pretend to be."
Shifting Sands
With the greatest of care not to attract undue attention, Morveer insinuated himself into the back of Duke Orso's great audience chamber. For such a vast and impressive room, it numbered but a few occupants. Perhaps a function of the difficult circumstances in which the great man found himself. Having catastrophically lost the most important battle in the history of Styria was bound to discourage visitors. Still, Morveer had always been drawn to employers in difficult circumstances. They tended to pay handsomely.
The Grand Duke of Talins was without doubt still a majestic presence. He sat upon a gilded chair, on a high dais, all in sable velvet trimmed with gold, and frowned down with regal fury over the shining helmets of half a dozen no less furious guardsmen. He was flanked by two men who could not have been more polar opposites. On the left a plump, ruddy-faced old fellow stood with a respectful but painful-looking bend to his hips, gold buttons about his chubby throat fastened to the point of uncomfortable tightness and, indeed, considerably beyond. He had ill-advisedly attempted to conceal his utter and obvious baldness by combing back and forth a few sad strands of wiry grey hair, cultivated to enormous length for this precise purpose. Orso's chamberlain. On the right, a curly-haired young man slouched with unexpected ease in travel-stained clothes, resting upon what appeared to be a long stick. Morveer had the frustrating sensation of having seen him somewhere before, but could not place him, and his relationship to the duke was, for now, a slightly worrying mystery.
The only other occupant of the chamber had his well-dressed back to Morveer, prostrate upon one knee on the strip of crimson carpet, clutching his hat in one hand. Even from the very back of the hall the gleaming sheen of sweat across his bald patch was most evident.
"What help from my son-in-law," Orso was demanding in stentorian tones, "the High King of the Union?"
The voice of the ambassador, for it appeared to be none other, had the whine of a well-whipped dog expecting further punishment. "Your son-in-law sends his earnest regrets—"