“Why don’t you go home to your wife, Arnoul?”
“Not until I’ve taught you some manners, serving bitch.”
He lunged forward, grabbing her by the lapels of her coat. Her heart leapt and she tried to pull back, but Arnoul’s grip was too firm.
“Let. Me. Go,” Solène said.
“Do big city bitches bleed like us simple townsfolk?” Arnoul said, his mouth twisting into a vindictive smile. He pressed the blade to her cheek.
Fear flooded through her. Arnoul had always been a talker. She’d never thought he would actually do something. She closed her eyes for an instant.
The next sound she heard was a squeal. A pig’s squeal. The knife clattered to the ground.
Solène stepped back and smoothed the front of her coat. Transformation magic always surprised her. She had only done it a couple of times, and never intentionally. It seemed as though it was her default defence when seriously threatened, which had been the case every time she had cast it. The first time, she had turned a rabid dog into a nose-twitching rabbit; the second, she’d changed a bully into a goat. That had been the incident that had forced her to flee her village. She knew from past experience that Arnoul would not remain a pig for long—a few minutes at most, unless she actively worked at prolonging the magic—and as soon as he reverted to his human form, she had no doubt he would denounce her as a witch.
It was Bastelle all over again, and it saddened her to think that her time in Trelain was over. Where would she make her bakery now? All the hard work she had put in in Trelain was for naught, all for want of being able to control her affliction. Still, what was the choice—having to move on, or having to carry a scar on her face for the rest of her life? Or worse? Angry, she was tempted to give the pig a good, hard kick, but it wasn’t in her nature. In any event, time was precious now. She needed to pack up her few possessions and flee. Where to?
She took a final look at Arnoul the Pig, wallowing in muck, snuffling about for food, and looking far more at home in the rubbish than he ever did in the tavern. Such a shame she didn’t have the time to enjoy it.
Solène jerked awake in the chair by the door in her small one-room home. Light came in through her threadbare curtains, and her travelling bag sat by her feet, where she had put it when she’d decided to rest for a moment before setting off. There was a barrage of banging on the door—the follow-up to the blow that had woken her. How long had she slept? Her heart raced with panic when there was more pounding on the door.
She swore. The same thing had happened with the dog and the bully—she had slept for hours after both incidents. She always felt tired after she used magic, but never as bad as when she transformed something. She should have remembered. She should have forced herself to keep going, not allowing herself to rest until she was miles from Trelain.
Arnoul would have been back in his usual form for hours. More than long enough to call the Town Watch, or worse, an Intelligencier.
There was another bang at the door, and she knew she had to act. There was one small window at the back of her room. Peering out, she saw two shadowy figures lurking outside. It confirmed her worst fear—men were coming to arrest her and there was no way out.
She took her black cloak from the nail on the wall, wrapped herself in it, and with no alternative, opened the door. There were a dozen people waiting to greet her, most of them soldiers. At their head stood an officer of the Town Watch. She recognised him—he drank at the tavern regularly—but they had only exchanged a few words. He had a dark expression on his face. At least he wasn’t an Intelligencier.
“You need to come with us, miss,” he said.
“Why? What’s wrong?” she said, but she knew the reason.
Someone shouted “witch,” and two Watchmen firmly grabbed Solène and dragged her out of her home.
CHAPTER 9
Trelain was the first stop on the road to Mirabay. It hove into view not long after nightfall, but many hours since Guillot’s backside and thighs had gone numb, unused to so much time in the saddle. The twinkling lights in its taller towers, which reached up above the town’s surrounding curtain wall, were a welcome sight. Guillot and dal Sason had spent the day in silence. He continued to feel unwell, but the symptoms were subsiding. Nonetheless, he sweated heavily and felt uncomfortably hot. His head ached and the anxiety that had gripped him on encountering the dragon was as imposing as ever. A cup or two of wine would have been welcome, but he had made himself a promise and was determined to stick to it. Those at the king’s court were welcome to think him a disgrace, but he had no desire to prove it to them by arriving drunk. The little pride he had left would not allow him to sink that low.
“Shall we stop for the night?” dal Sason asked.
Guillot nodded.
“The Prince Bishop is covering all the expenses?” Gill said.
“Of course.”
“We’re staying at the Black Drake, then.”
He had been worried that dal Sason might insist they press on. Although he had said nothing about it, he desperately longed for a break from the saddle. Pressing on and exhausting themselves would slow their journey in the end, not hasten it. In the morning they could exchange their horses at the Royal Waypost in town; the fresh mounts would let them make better time.
They rode into Trelain, passing through the gate with not so much as a glance from the tired guards. Trelain was far from the troubled western marches, and was shielded from the Darvarosians to the south by a range of impenetrable mountains. However, Mirabayan noblemen were famed for warring on one another. Thanks to intricately woven family ties, when inheritance time came around, there were often a great many cousins with a claim to press. Even in a province insulated from outside danger, sturdy walls were a necessity.
Though Trelain was a large town, it would still neatly fit within one of Mirabay’s districts. The wealth generated by the region’s winemaking was evident in the buildings that lined the streets, from the private homes of wealthy burgesses to the decorated limestone public buildings that dominated the skyline. The surroundings were a taste of what Mirabay would be like, and it made Guillot even more anxious.
Dal Sason went inside to book their rooms, while Gill brought their horses around to the inn’s stable yard. Given that the Prince Bishop was picking up the bills, Guillot had given dal Sason the name of the most expensive inn he knew of in Trelain—the Black Drake. The sign swinging over the ornate stone doorway, with its finely painted and fierce-looking black dragon, sent a chill through him, reminding Gill of what Yves had said—this was dragon country.
If he was being honest with himself, he was nervous about what lay ahead, about how he would feel, how he would be treated by people he had not seen in years. His fatigue hammered home how far removed he was from the man he had been. There was a time when he had been able to ride through the night and fight the next day. He knew he wasn’t yet too old for such feats. His poor conditioning could not be blamed on the ravages of time, only his own choices. He wondered if he could possibly undo the damage the last half-decade had wrought.
Looking at the people still on the streets at that hour of the evening, he wondered what they would think if he told them a dragon was attacking farms to the south. They would assume he was mad, obviously, and as he drifted ever further from the influence of alcohol, he began to wonder if he had imagined the whole thing. The attack he had witnessed was too vivid to be a hallucination. He could still smell the burning and feel the heat on his skin. The sinister black shape, its scales glistening in the moonlight, was an image that would never leave him.