Now and then he heard whispers of Tethis. Aimes still sat on the throne and Prince Syannis still ruled in all but name, erratic and vicious while the kingdom simmered with discontent. No one had raised an army to seek revenge for Meridian and the little kingdom was at peace, but still, it was an uneasy one. He asked for word of Gelisya and Fasha, and eventually he had an answer. The queen’s bonds-maid had given birth to a boy. What had happened to him since, none of them could say.
He had a son.
The lancers became his friends, twenty men lost in a world they only half understood. They taught him to ride, to hold a spear steady in a gallop and how to look after a horse. Talon had been reluctant to take them at first, complaining of the cost of their animals. But after the sun-king’s armies broke for the second time that season and the Hawks found themselves in the midst of a rout, he changed his mind. The lancers were imposing enough to deter the gleeful bloodlust of thousands of enemy horsemen towards easier targets, and the Hawks escaped what might have been their slaughter.
Towards the end of that second year, as the sun-king’s armies nursed their wounds, Berren took to giving sword lessons as a way to fill the days. He taught men as Tasahre had taught him, and Syannis and Silvestre too. He taught them to be quick, to be dirty, to thumb their nose at honour and grace and cheat every way they could if it would keep them alive. His reputation spread — the Bloody Judge of Tethis — and by the end of the season soldiers from other companies, even officers from the sun-king’s armies, were coming to him to learn.
He wintered again in the south. This time Talon went away. When he returned, months later, he wouldn’t say where he’d been but Berren could see it in his face: he’d been home and what he’d seen had scared him.
‘Your slave is alive and well,’ he said to Berren one day as they prepared for battle once more. ‘The child too. When this season is over, I promise you will see them again. It’s been long enough now.’
See them, Berren thought bitterly. Not touch them or hold them or feel them or talk to them. See them. Like promising a cup to man dying of thirst, but only the cup, not the water that should go in it.
The battle-priests and the officers returned for that last year, and fresh legions came with them. The rebels crumbled and the sun-king’s armies swept through them like fire. Berren saw cities that dwarfed Tethis burned to the ground, their entire populations crucified as a warning to others. The roads were lined with crosses; the air stank of death and decay, but he found it didn’t bother him. At night, when there was nowhere better to seek plunder, he would cut down the corpses and search, in case the soldiers who had strung up the bodies had missed something. One late summer evening, with the war done and behind them, as the Hawks began the long road to the ships that would take them home again, Berren caught sight of himself in a puddle by the roadside. For a moment he paused, bemused. The man staring back at him was a stranger. Gaunt, with lines on his face that he’d never seen before and a badly trimmed beard. He had a dozen scars from three years of fighting and his whole shape had changed. But most of all he didn’t recognise the eyes. They were cold soulless things. He looked at his hands, the calluses around his palm. They were forged for killing now, and when he tried to imagine them against Fasha’s silky-soft skin, he could only see the horror in her face as she recoiled from their senseless touch. The feeling passed, but it was a while before he understood its meaning. He was afraid. After three years of fighting, a score of battles, after killing more men than he could count, he was afraid that something inside him had changed and was lost and would never be found again.
‘Do I have enough?’ he asked Talon as they made their way home, standing together at the prow of Talon’s ship. The sun-king and his armies were gone, and Kalda was drifting towards them. It was exactly how he remembered it, how he’d seen it when he’d been a ship’s skag four years earlier. It had even been the same time of year.
‘I hope so.’ Talon laughed bitterly. ‘When Syannis takes one look at what you’ve become, he’ll give her away for free if there’s any sense left in him.’ He looked Berren up and down. ‘The Bloody Judge, the King-Slayer, the Crown-Taker. How many men have fallen to your swords? You have become terrible to behold, my friend.’
Yet beneath the Bloody Judge lay Berren, not long a man. And Fasha? And my son? What will they see?
29
They disembarked from the ship. Before the Hawks dispersed and went their separate ways, Talon took a roll-call of his men, of who would return to fight again next year and who would not. Most boarded new ships to take them home, wherever home happened to be. Others, like Talon and Tarn and Berren, let the city swallow them up, each finding his own comforts for the winter months. Talon took Berren and Tarn to the taverns they’d visited years ago. They got blind drunk together, passed out together, woke up the next day and did it again. Berren drank to numb the fear inside him. Talon. . Talon drank a lot when he wasn’t fighting at the best of times, but there was something different now, some shared desire for oblivion that drew them together. Tarn drank to keep them company. Berren and Tarn had been tight as a sailor’s cleat in the years of fighting; now Berren felt him slipping away from both of them. He and Talon each carried a burden that the other understood, ones that Tarn could never share.
‘Did Syannis ever tell you what happened to Aimes?’ Talon slurred one night, when they were both well into their cups.
Berren shook his head. Aimes wasn’t right in the head, and if Berren hadn’t known that already, it would have been obvious from the moment they’d met in the flesh. ‘Didn’t you say he was kicked in the head by a horse?’ There was more, though, and it had something to do with Saffran Kuy. Syannis had let that much slip.
‘Syannis always thought it was his fault. He’d been so used to the idea that he was going to be king one day. When Aimes arrived I suppose he couldn’t help but be jealous. Then Kuy came. He always made the hairs on my skin prickle, but I was only a boy while Syannis was into his changing years. I couldn’t tell you whether Kuy sought Syannis out or whether it was the other way around, but they became like thieves, always together, always skulking apart from the rest of us. I used to follow them around the castle, secretly so they didn’t know I was there, but I wasn’t very good at it and they usually caught me.’ He laughed. ‘It used to drive Syannis wild.’