No one crosses the Scorpion and lives.
No indeed. Just as no one thrown into this pit ever comes out, not even their bones.
'You anticipated the attempt on Manion's life to be through trickery not direct action,' she told Gabali. 'That's why you brought a long rope.'
And who better to smuggle one in than the man who used to throw victims into the Pit?
'Si.' Gabali's smile lacked warmth. 'To think like an assassin, it is best to be an assassin. To shoot the Scorpion in public would draw too much attention and risked killing the wrong man.'
'Yet Manion believed Ptian would still take the gamble?'
'He was closing in on him and needed to stop him. Ptian knew this-'
'Wait.' Too many things had happened in too short a time. Her head pounded from overload. 'Wait. He needed to stop him?'
'Manion knows that sedition is not the answer. Unlike Ptian, he truly appreciates how immense your empire stretches, how powerful its authority, how mighty its retribution, whereas Ptian continually underestimated its strength and chose to disregard its…'
Claudia had ceased to listen.
I've read a lot about Rome and its conquests lately. There was so much to learn, too.
'Gabali, when Manion talked about the civil wars that tore us apart, yet said how Caesar still managed to conquer much of Gaul, he wasn't suggesting Aquitania could follow suit at all, was he?'
He was telling her that he understood how powerful the Empire was.
'Here.' Orbilio wrapped his strong arm around her. 'You're shivering.'
But not with the cold, and though she tried to shake his arm off, the strength had leached from her body.
'And the fact that we annexed Egypt while still bitterly divided didn't mean Gaul could do the same,' she said dully.
Gabali's face changed from anguished to something approaching alarm as he picked up the tone of her words. 'No, Merchant Seferius, it did not.'
'I want what's best for my people, he said, and when he said victory, I thought he meant over us, but dear god, he meant victory over Ptian. Sweet Janus, Orbilio, don't you see what I've done?' She could hardly speak from teeth that wouldn't stop chattering. 'Manion was the second man I killed tonight.'
May the gods have mercy, she'd just murdered an innocent man.
Thirty
Once words are written down, they become frozen, Beth had said, and once something freezes it dies.
But like nature and the seasons, change is as inevitable as it is anticipated, and in the way that an acorn grows into an oak or a tadpole turns into a frog, so she understood that the Hundred-Handed must also change, or the order would die.
It had taken tragedy upon tragedy for her to see this, but as she sat at the birth point on the pentagram table, cradling her swollen bruised jaw, she understood that her role went beyond simply overseeing the propitious start of new years and new lives. It was to encourage the birth of new ideas.
She had been wrong to suppress the truth about Clytie. The pentagram priestesses had known almost from the start that she had killed herself on that rock. The heavy-handed, almost clownish cosmetics on her face smacked of a child's handiwork, and the arrangement of her body revealed an innocence which no copycat killer would have thought of. She had immediately instituted a search and found a stick in which Clytie had notched her reasons for killing herself, a stick so thin that it had blown into the bushes in the wind. But a stick nonetheless. And for their sins, the pentagram covered it up.
They agreed that by keeping it quiet, the tragedy would blow over, and agreed with the Death Priestess that no blame should be attached to the three little conspirators for moving her body.
The pentagram priestesses were wrong.
We are all of us accountable for our actions, Beth thought, even a twelve-year-old child, and it matters not a jot whether that decision is wrong or it's right, that decision is not ours. It was Clytie's. She should at least have told Gabali the truth when he came searching for answers, but she remembered the fierce love he'd held for Mavor and the passion she'd shared with him, and equally the passion of unrequited love that beat in the heart of Fearn. Better, the pentagram priestesses agreed, that Gabali was fobbed off and the quicker Mavor would get over him. Once again, they miscalculated.
Gabali's instincts as a father would not let it go. His capacity to love was too strong.
Whereas Beth's own instincts had failed her on every level…
She had listened to Fearn — who abused her authority as one of the pentagram in an effort to split Gabali from Mavor, even at the expense of the death of her own child — without delving deeper into Fearn's reasons.
She'd allowed herself to be swayed by Ailm, who single-handedly insisted that Vanessia, Aridella and Lin should not be punished, instead of asking herself why Ailm, who systematically refused to cast a deciding vote, should fight so vehemently on this one particular issue.
Then there was the notched stick, which she found by her bed. Labelling her a cheat and a liar, it insinuated that she'd manipulated the previous Head of the College when she was dying in order to gain her promotion. Beth knew there was only one person who would think such a thing, but instead of confronting Ailm or enquiring whether she'd sent similar poison to others, she'd shrugged it off. Kind or spiteful, all words are simply breath, she had argued, and breath is gone with the wind.
So many mistakes, she reflected, balling her hands into fists. So many mistakes when she'd defied her own instincts to listen to others, believing their hearts were pure when they were not, and even her instincts as a mother had failed her. She closed her eyes. How little she imagined twenty-seven years ago, when she begged that Ptian be sold to family close by that she might keep an eye on him as he grew up, the poison that would brew in his heart. Stories filtered back of bullying other children and tormenting cats, but this was a phase, she convinced herself. He'd grow out of it. Instead he moved to wife-beating, child abuse, drunkenness and worse, but rather than face the fact that Ptian was violent by nature, she used her influence to tip the balance in being shunned by his people. Isolation would teach him humility and contrition, she thought. Instead, he was on the verge of unleashing unimaginable horrors.
But. She sighed. Ptian was dead and his corroded soul fed to the dragon.
Now what?
Placing her hands flat on the table, Beth opened her eyes and stared not at Luisa and Dora, but at the two empty chairs either side of her. It had taken the very brink of slaughter and bloodshed for her to come to her senses. Crisis had cleared her mind.
She regretted it had taken Clytie's suicide, Sarra's murder and the death of her own son before she finally understood what she'd been born for. To lead. To lead the HundredHanded not through the daily routines and the seasons, but the changes life itself brings.
Instate a fairer ballot, Ailm had snapped when asked to cast the deciding vote on the issue of witchcraft.
Fair? With the shocking events in the past twenty-four hours, Beth no longer understood the meaning of fair. But she did understand that, instead of casting three votes at the pentagram, she needed to change the law. From now on the Head of the College would still guide the proceedings, but hers would be the final vote. Hers and hers alone.
So even though Oak and Rowan were in favour of expelling Yew from the Hundred-Handed, when they felt Gorse should keep her place, Beth used her powers for the first time.
'Fearn had allowed personal issues to dictate College matters,' she argued. 'Such an abuse could not be tolerated. And the three girls must be punished for the sin they'd committed.'
Yes, of course, they were scared, but they were scared for themselves not for Clytie, who had killed herself on the stone where they played. Worse, they gave no thought to the consequences of someone else having the shock of finding her body, much less the potential ravages of animals or the fear that would be unleashed at the prospect of a vicious killer on the loose. Children or not, rightly or wrongly, fair or unjust, those girls bore as much culpability as Ailm in the matter of Clytie's suicide.