‘The girl!’ I shouted at him, ‘take out the girl!’
But it was too late: four armoured men stood around Trin, their shields protecting her and the Duchess.
I leapt onto Monster and kicked her hard towards Valiana, who had risen from the ground but was looking around in confusion.
‘Your hand, girl! Give me your hand!’ I cried, but she didn’t hear me.
One of the Duke’s soldiers tried to slice at Monster’s exposed neck. I parried the cut but he pulled back and aimed for me. I saw the shaft of an arrow appear in the slit of his helm – an almost impossible shot – and I thanked Saint Merhan-who-rides-the-arrow for Brasti’s miraculous aim. The man fell down – and then I saw it.
Two of the four men guarding the Duchess and her daughter had stepped out of formation, and I had an opening: with one good thrust I could kill the daughter and, if I was lucky, I might get the Duchess too, before the other soldiers got me in the back. I wanted it – and Monster wanted it too, I could telclass="underline" two broken creatures running headlong for the cliff.
I had a brief vision of seeing my King again, standing with the Saints, as I pulled my arm into line for the thrust, then I felt something on my left hand. Valiana was trying to get up behind me onto Monster. I turned back, but the soldiers had re-formed and all I saw in front of me were shields.
I gave Valiana my arm and pulled her up, and then Brasti, Kest and I raced like bloody black Death for the rising eastern sky. I felt sick at leaving behind Feltock, Blondie and the others to die, but this wasn’t the first time in my life that I had followed an order like that.
THE TAILOR OF PHAN
We rode through the morning skies and the evening sunsets, past the boundary markers for Orison and all the way into the yellow fields of the Duchy of Pulnam. I had to force Monster to stop often enough to keep the horses from running themselves to death, but though we rode for as long and as fast as we could, we never made it to the village of Gaziah or the monastery. The only way to pass Pulnam and get to the beginnings of the Eastern Desert was through the Arch: a fifty-foot gully with massive sheer walls on either side, formed by the wind and sand that blew west from the desert itself.
We stopped to rest in a small village a few miles west of the Arch. Valiana and Aline weren’t trained for hard riding and they were saddle-sore and exhausted. And then there was the matter of their lives being shattered …
When Brasti went to scout ahead, he saw the army arrayed there, waiting for us.
‘I don’t think their scouts saw me,’ he said, ‘but they were already starting to march this way. There’s no way forward, and with the Duke’s men and who knows how many reinforcements from Orison after us, there’s no way back.’
‘Where are we now?’ I asked.
‘The village is called Phan,’ he said. ‘There’s not much here. I asked a boy down the road and he said there’re just a few merchants here, along with the butcher, the smithy and a tailor’s shop, if I heard him right.’
‘Hide, ride or fight?’ Kest asked.
‘Can’t ride, can’t fight,’ Brasti said.
I didn’t have an answer. Something was bothering me.
‘Then we hide,’ said Kest. ‘Can we make do in one of the forests?’
‘Look around,’ Brasti said. ‘It’s mostly fields in Pulnam until you get to the Arch, and the forests they do have are too small. That army looks to have a good five hundred men. They won’t have much trouble smoking us out.’
Aline started crying and Valiana, who hadn’t spoken since Orison, put her arms around her.
‘Then where?’ Kest asked.
‘I suppose we could try to hide here, but I don’t imagine the locals will lie for us when the Duke’s men arrive.’
‘How far behind us are they, do you suppose?’ I asked.
Brasti took a deep breath. ‘Honestly? I don’t think they’re very far. They had better mounts and more of them, and we’ve had to stop far too often to outdistance them by much. The damn wagons could have caught up to us by now.’
‘Doesn’t it seem like an awful lot of work?’ I asked.
‘They want the girl dead,’ Brasti said.
‘They want the scrolls proving Valiana’s lineage, and they already have those.’
‘No, they don’t,’ Valiana said, looking up from where she and Aline were huddled. ‘Feltock made me take them out when we left Rijou. He told me to keep my travelling papers in the packet instead.’
She reached into a pocket in her blouse and pulled out a pair of scrolls marked with Ducal seals.
‘Well, isn’t he a cunning old fox?’ Brasti said, admiration in his voice.
Kest looked at me. ‘It does give us something to bargain with.’
Bargain with the most powerful and canny woman in the world, in front of the army she was commanding? And then what? She kills us, and what’s the difference? Better to just burn the damn papers and see what chaos that brings.
I was tired and sore and more confused than I’d ever been. I walked over to Valiana, who was still hugging Aline.
‘I’m out of ideas and out of hope,’ I said. ‘Just tell me what you want me to do, Valiana, and I’ll do it as best I can.’
‘I’m not Valiana,’ she said. ‘I’m no one and nothing – or if I am something, it’s just what you said in Rijou: a foolish girl who dreamt of sitting on a Queen’s throne without ever thinking about what she would do when she got there.’
I felt a hand on my arm and looked down into Aline’s eyes. She sniffed and then said, ‘We hide, Falcio. We hide, and then we ride, and then we fight.’
I started to pull my arm away but she hung onto it. ‘I don’t think we can win, Aline,’ I said softly.
She took a deep breath and stood up a bit straighter. ‘I know that, but what they’re doing isn’t right. It isn’t fair. And maybe if we fight a little, we can make it a bit more fair. The world should be a more fair place, don’t you think?’
Then I put my hand on her cheek and she gave me a little smile, just for an instant, but I swear with every Saint at my back that in that moment my heart broke and my mind followed, and great wracking sobs filled the air as a thousand hurts arose in my body that I hadn’t felt in so long, from my first bruise to the arrow I took in the leg, and every wound I had forgotten on the long walk to Castle Aramor where I went to kill a King; the sight of my wife’s wasted body on the tavern floor and the sight of the burned mansion in Rijou; the knowledge that I had failed my King to the knowledge that I was about to fail this little girl – all of it came out of me until every wound, every memory, every sorrow was voiced. The tears bled from my eyes until I thought there was nothing left – but there was one thing there. Nothing grand, no great plan or hope.
Just a small thing.
‘Brasti,’ I said softly.
He came over and knelt beside me.
‘What can I do?’ he asked gently.
‘Did you tell me that there was a tailor’s shop in this village?’
It was a small village, so it shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to find the little house on the outskirts, but finally we did find it. We stood outside a tiny tailor’s shop, supported on two sides by crooked trees.
‘I don’t get it,’ Brasti said. ‘What good is a tailor going to be?’
Kest answered for me. ‘Have you ever in your entire life heard of a tailor’s shop in a village this size? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Then what do you—? No – you don’t think …?’
A cackling voice broke the silence. ‘Well now, ain’t you just about the sorriest-looking pack of half-dead rabbits I’ve ever seen?’