Because she wanted to be fooled.
You’ve got to be realistic, that old Northman on the farm near Squaredeal used to tell her. Got to be realistic. And she’d leaned on the fence with a stalk of grass in her teeth and nodded sagely along. And yet, in spite of all she’d seen and all she’d suffered, she was still the least realistic fool in the Circle of the World.
‘Look, Shevedieh …’ Carcolf’s voice was smooth and calm and reasonable, a politician explaining their great plans for the nation. ‘I can see how you might feel … a little bit deceived.’
‘A little bit?’ squeaked Shev, her voice going high with disbelief.
‘I just wanted …’ Carcolf looked down, prodding at a bent teaspoon with one pointed toe, and glanced up shyly under her lashes, trying on the innocent new bride for size, ‘… to know that you cared.’
Shev’s eyes went even wider. She positively goggled. ‘So … it was all a fucking test?’
‘No! Well, yes. I wanted to know we’ve got something … that can last, is all. That didn’t come out right!’
‘How could that come out right?’
‘Because you passed! You passed and then some!’ Carcolf padded towards her. That walk she had. God, that walk. ‘You came for me. I never thought you would. My hero, eh? Heroine. Whichever.’
‘You could’ve just asked me!’
Carcolf crushed her face up as she came closer. ‘But … you know … people say all kinds of things in bed that it’s probably not best to put to too hard a test later on-’
‘So I’m beginning to fucking see!’
Carcolf’s brows drew in a touch. An impatient mother, frustrated that her daughter’s tantrum won’t subside. ‘Look. I know it’s been a hard night for everyone but it all turned out for the best. Now you’re square with Horald, and I’m square with Horald, and we can-’
Shev felt a sudden cold twinge in her stomach. ‘What do you mean, you’re square with Horald?’
‘Well …’ A flicker of annoyance across Carcolf’s face that she’d let something slip, then she started flapping her hands around like a circus magician disguising a trick. ‘I had a little debt of my own, as it happens, and he had the debt to the High Priestess, so, you know, favours for favours, we could help each other out. It’s the Styrian way, Shev, isn’t it? But that’s not the point-’
‘So you sold my friend to settle your debt?’
If Shev had been hoping Carcolf would sag like a punctured wineskin with the weight of her shame, she was disappointed. ‘Javre’s a fucking menace!’ Carcolf stepped closer with a stabbing finger. ‘As long as she was here you’d just have got sucked back into her madness like you always do! You had to get free of her. We had to get free of her. You told me so, in this room!’
Shev winced. ‘But I didn’t mean it! I mean, I did mean it but … not this way-’
‘What way, then?’ asked Carcolf. ‘You were never going to do it. You know it now. You knew it then. That’s why you said it. I had to do it for you.’
‘So … you’ve done me a favour?’
‘I think so.’ Carcolf stepped closer. Fair now, humble, a merchant offering the deal of a lifetime. ‘And I think … when you’ve had time to think about it … you’ll think so, too.’
She smiled down, taller than Shev even without her shoes. A winning smile. Point proved. Argument won.
She took horrified silence for agreement, reached out and cupped Shev’s face in her hands. The sensitive lover, whose only joy was her partner’s happiness.
‘Just us,’ she whispered, leaning close. ‘Better than ever.’
Carcolf sucked at Shev’s top lip. Then she nipped the bottom one with her teeth, pulled it back, almost painful, and let it go with the faintest flapping sound. Shev’s head was full of that scent, but there was no sweetness in it any more. It was just sour. Gaudy. Sickening.
‘Now let me get dressed, and we’ll go have fun.’
‘Fun’s your middle name,’ whispered Shev, wanting to shove her off. To shove her off and punch her in the face besides.
Shev didn’t much like to be honest with herself. Who does? But if she accepted the pain of it for just a moment, it wasn’t Carcolf’s treachery that truly hurt. You can’t bed a snake then complain when you get bit. It was that Shev had suddenly realised there was no secret self hidden under Carcolf’s smirking mask. There was just another mask, and another. Whatever role it suited her to play. Whatever got her what she wanted. If Carcolf had anything underneath, it was hard and shiny as a flint.
She had no first name to learn.
A few hours ago Shev had been willing to kill for this woman. Willing to die for her. Now she didn’t feel love, or lust, or even much anger. She just felt sad. Sad and bruised and so, so disappointed.
She made herself smile. ‘All right.’ She made herself put her hand on Carcolf’s cheek, brush a strand of golden hair back behind her ear. ‘You get dressed. But I promise you it won’t be for long.’
‘Oh, promises make me nervous.’ Carcolf brushed the tip of Shev’s nose with her fingertip as she let her go. ‘I never know whether to trust them.’
‘You’re the one who lies for a living. I just steal for one.’
Carcolf grinned back at her from the bedroom doorway, calm and beautiful as ever. ‘True enough.’
The moment she was gone, Shev snatched up her bag and walked out.
She didn’t even shut the door.
Freedom!
A note from the publisher
Following his death at the age of ninety-five, this fragment was discovered, crumpled, stained and almost worn through, plugging a hole in the sole of an ancient boot belonging to Spillion Sworbreck, the noted biographer, epicurean and poet widely known for, among a bibliography of daunting scale, his eighteen-volume The Life of Dab Sweet, Scourge of the Wild Frontier, and The Grand Duchess of Villainy, his romantic reimagining of the career of Monzcarro Murcatto presented in epic verse.
Fact? Whimsy? Satire? The origins and purpose of the writing remain entirely a mystery, but it is now published for the first time, along with its peculiar footnote, written in a different hand from the author’s, florid and sharply angled. A reader’s observation? A critic’s opinion? An editor’s verdict? Only you, dear reader, can be the judge …
Being an absolutely true account of the liberation of the town of Averstock from the grip of the incorrigible rebel menace by the Company of the Gracious Hand under the Famous Nicomo Cosca penned by your humble servant Spillion Sworbreck.
Averstock, Summer 590
What can my unworthy pen set down upon the subject of that great heart, that good friend, that magnificent presence, that dauntless explorer, proud statesman, peerless swordsman, accomplished lover, occasional sea captain, amateur sculptor of renown, noted connoisseur, champion short-distance swimmer and warrior poet, the famous soldier of fortune, Nicomo Cosca?
He was a man of great parts, of extraordinary abilities both mental and physical, of a keen mind and a quickness to action characteristic of the fox, but with a sensitivity and mercy of which the gentlest dove would have been envious. He was a giving friend, quick to laugh and generous to a fault, but an implacable enemy, loved and feared equally across the Circle of the World, none of the diverse lands of which were unknown to him. And yet, in spite of grand achievements at his back to fill five famous lifetimes, he held not a trace of arrogance or vanity, was always challenging himself to do better, to reach further, to aim higher, and, though his conduct had in the main, across his dozens of successful campaigns, been unimpeachable, was frequently troubled by what he saw as the regrets and disappointments of the past. ‘Regrets,’ as he once told this unworthy reporter, with a boundless sadness plainly stamped into that noble visage, ‘are the cost of the business.’