I tried to ignore him, but when he removed his hands, I couldn’t help myself. ‘So what is it?’
‘What is what?’
‘The secret. You promised to tell me a secret, but then you hit me instead.’
Bal ignored the jibe. Resuming his whisper and conspiratorial manner, he leaned closer, as if nothing had happened. ‘Well, when King Ugrid decreed that the Greatcoats would never ride again, he said it would be for all time, right?’
I nodded.
‘King Ugrid had a councillor named Caeolo – Caeolo the Mystery, they called him – and some people believed he was a wizard of great skill and wisdom.’
‘I’ve never heard of Caeolo,’ I said, excitement overwhelming sore cheek and wounded pride.
‘Very few have,’ Bal said. ‘Caeolo vanished mysteriously before Ugrid died, and he never appeared again.’
‘Maybe he killed Ugrid … Maybe he—’
Bal interrupted me. ‘Now don’t start that mind of yours tumbling all over itself, Falcio. Once it starts, it won’t stop until you pass out from exhaustion.’ The storyteller looked around the room again, though there was no one else there except for the tavern master cleaning cups at the other end of the room. I don’t know if he could hear us, but he had good ears on him.
‘Well, as the story goes, after the decree was read aloud in the court, Caeolo took his King aside and said, “My King, though you are Lord of all things and I but your humble councillor, know that the words of a King, no matter how powerful, outlive him by no more than a hundred years.” Ugrid looked at him, shocked at the impertinence, and cried, “What do you think you’re saying to me, Caeolo?” Unperturbed, Caeolo answered, “Only this, my King, that in a hundred years the Greatcoats will ride again, and your mighty words will fade from memory.”’
Bal looked down at me with what, at the time, I thought was a sparkle in his eyes, although now, looking back, I think it might well have been a tear.
‘And do you know how long ago King Ugrid died?’ Bal asked me. When I shook my head, he leaned in close and spoke directly into my ear. ‘Almost a hundred years.’
My heart leapt straight up out of my chest. It was like my blood had been replaced with lightning. I could—
‘Damn you, Bal,’ the tavern master shouted from across the room. ‘Don’t you go filling that boy’s head with your horseshit.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. My voice sounded strange to me for a moment.
The tavern master stepped out from behind the bar. ‘There never were no damned Greatcoats. It’s just a story people tell when they ain’t happy with the way things are. Travelling Magisters going about armoured in leather cloaks and fighting with swords and hearing complaints from bloody peasants and servants? It’s shit folk-tales, boy. It never happened.’
Something about the way he dismissed the Greatcoats so easily – so completely – made the world feel small and empty to me – as small and empty as a house filled with nothing but the idle fancies of a small boy and the sad longings of a lonely woman who still stared outside on cold winter evenings, waiting for her long-gone husband to return.
Bal started to protest the tavern master’s comments, but I interrupted, ‘You’re wrong – you’re wrong! There were too Greatcoats, and they did do all those things. Stupid rotten King Ugrid banned them, but Caeolo knew! He said they’re going to come back one day and they are too going to come back!’
I ran for the door before someone else could hit me – but then I stopped and turned around and I put my fist up on my heart. ‘And I’m going to be one of them,’ I swore. And this time it really did sound like a vow.
The second story I need to tell you took place two years ago, in Cheveran, one of the larger trade cities in the south of Tristia, and it began with a woman’s scream.
‘Monster! Give me my daughter!’ The woman was close to my age, perhaps thirty years old, with black hair and blue eyes like those of the little girl I was carrying in my arms. I imagined she was quite pretty when she wasn’t screaming.
‘Mummy, what’s wrong?’ the girl asked.
I had seen the child fall when her foot had got caught on the table-leg of a fruit-seller’s stand next to the alley that had apparently been her destination. Her eyes full of terror, she’d told me a man in Knight’s armour was pursuing her but when I looked for him he was gone. I’d carried the girl the entire way to her home, which wouldn’t have been very far except that she kept getting confused about the right way back.
‘Her ankle is sprained,’ I said, trying to shake the water from my hair to keep it from dripping into my eyes. It’s always raining in Cheveran.
The woman ran back inside her house – I’d assumed it was to get towels, but when she returned she was in fact brandishing a long kitchen knife. ‘Give me my daughter, Trattari,’ she cried.
‘Mummy!’ the girl screamed into my ear.
There’s a great deal of screaming in this story. Best get used to it now.
‘I told you, her ankle is sprained,’ I said. ‘Now kindly let me in so I can put her down. You can try and stab me afterwards.’
If the woman thought I was in the least bit clever she covered it up by yelling for help. ‘Trattari! Oh, help me! A tatter-cloak has my daughter!’
‘Oh, Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears, just let me put the girl down!’
With no apparent help coming, the woman eyed me warily and then backed away into the house, the knife still between us. I wasn’t worried for myself – my coat would blunt any impact from being stabbed – but there was a decent chance the woman would end up hitting her own daughter in the process.
In the central room of the house there was a small settee. I placed the girl on her side, but she immediately sat up, then winced when her foot touched the ground.
The woman ran to her daughter, wrapping her arms around her and squeezing her before pulling back to look at every inch of her. ‘What have you done to her?’
‘Other than help her when she fell, carry her here and listen to you scream at me? Nothing.’
The girl looked up at us. ‘It’s true, Mummy; I was being chased by a Knight and then this man helped me.’
The mother kept an eye on me and her knife between us. ‘Oh, sweet Beatta, silly child, no Knight would ever harm you. He was probably trying to protect you.’
Beatta made a face. ‘That’s silly. I was just trying to buy an apple from the fruitman.’
At that moment, two men and a boy of about twelve ran into the house. ‘Saints, Merna, what’s the matter?’ the taller of the two men asked. All three were of a set: sandy-brown hair and square-jawed, dressed in the brown overalls of labourers. The two men were carrying hammers and the boy held a rock in his fist.
‘This Trattari had my daughter!’ Merna said.
I held up both my hands in a gesture of – well, please-don’t-attack-me. ‘There’s a misunderstanding, I—’
‘There’s a misunderstanding, all right,’ one of the men said, taking a step forward. ‘You seem to think a tatter-cloak is welcome to come here and attack our women.’
‘Aye,’ said the other. ‘Servants of the dead tyrant aren’t welcome here, Trattari.’
Despite my desire to calm the situation, I found that my rapier was in my right hand, its point close to the man’s neck. ‘Call the King that again, friend, and we’ll have a problem that your hammer won’t solve.’