Stephen Deas - The King's assassin

She lifted her veil and her eyes were wide and sad. She stared at Berren and Berren stared back. He tried to remember Tasahre, to put the two of them side by side, and found he couldn’t. The sword-monk’s face kept slipping between the fingers of his memory; and sometimes he thought it was a wilful thing, that her memories had slowly chosen to leave him because of the awful things he’d done: for the old woman after the battle of the beach, for the bloody whipping in the castle yard of Tethis and for the guard under the castle whose throat he hadn’t slit.

‘My mistress says your name is Berren,’ she said.

Berren nodded.

‘Bondsmen don’t have names.’ Her eyes bored into him. ‘But when I did have one, it was Fasha. Master Berren, I have not been truthful. I have not run away. I have come to humbly petition you on behalf of my mistress, Princess Gelisya of Tethis, daughter of the regent Meridian, for your aid.’

‘My aid? In what?’ He was staring at her. He couldn’t help it.

Fasha’s voice grew urgent. ‘The warlock. He has touched my mistress. I fear for her. He will ruin her. He’s touched you too.’ She sank carefully to her knees and bowed her head. ‘Master Berren, my mistress pleads with you: she begs you to help her. Will you do this?’

‘Why ask me?’

When she looked up, her face was torn with grief. ‘My mistress says you are the only one who can stop him. She says she has seen it, that it must be you. I will give you gold.’

‘I don’t want gold. Not for this. I’ll kill Saffran Kuy out of spite.’

‘You will help us?’ Berren nodded. A moment later she was on her feet. She stood right in front of him, so close that they were almost touching and he could smell her skin, a slight tang of rain and sweat. She looked up at him, face brimming with hope. ‘Truly? You will help us?’

‘If the help you seek is the murder of Saffran Kuy, then yes.’ When did it become so easy to be a killer?

She took a step away from him. ‘Best not speak it aloud.’

‘This is a war.’ Berren tore his eyes off her. ‘Wars are filled with vicious deeds. When it’s done, I’ll free you. Both of you. And I’ll not take your gold, but I might take some from your mistress.’ Her closeness was making his heart beat fast. Two years at sea and then another as a soldier and he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be close to a woman. What it had been like with Tasahre, standing among the stolen relics of the House of Cats and Gulls; but now he felt it again, a hunger and a longing almost too great to hold back.

‘Thank you.’ Fasha reached a hand to touch his face and Berren took it in his own, pressing her fingers against his skin. His other hand touched her hip, drawing her gently closer. She put a hand over his heart. ‘If you will help us, I am to give you a gift.’

‘I don’t a need a gift.’ But he did. His hand went from her fingers to her face, cupping her cheek, tilting back her chin, running slowly down the pale naked skin of her neck; and if she’d pulled away now, he wasn’t sure he could have stopped himself from pulling her back, and what sort of monster was he for that? But she didn’t. She pressed herself closer and his hand on her neck slipped to her breast and felt the stiffness and the beating heart beneath as she drew his head to hers and closed her eyes.

‘Berren,’ she murmured. ‘Berren. Whisper your name to me.’ And he did, and she kissed him, slowly at first and then with a desperate passion, the both of them like starving men stumbling upon an unexpected feast. She moaned and cried out as Berren’s fingers found her, and Berren gasped as hers did the same, as they tore each other naked and devoured one another, clawing and urgent and oblivious to the world beyond the circles of their embrace. And when their first throes of passion were done, Fasha took his face in her hands and led him to the bed and they lay down together, one beside the other, and simply stared into one another and stroked and touched and explored with fingers and tongues, all through the night until the first cracks of morning eased their way through the shutters on the window and the dawn roosters crowed.

‘I must go.’ The words brushed Berren’s ear like perfumed silk. He let his eyes watch her as she dressed and then he called her to him and ran his hands over her skin once more. His fingers lingered over the scars on her back.

‘I should never have done that to you,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry. I had no choice.’ And he felt Tasahre’s memory turn and walk away, sad and shaking her head. There is always a choice, Berren. Always a choice . And she was right. Don’t look to ease the harm, Berren. Look to do good. There is a difference .

‘You weren’t the one who made me a bonds-maid.’ Fasha closed her eyes. ‘And I thought you were a warlock’s boy. I knew what would come of what I did.’

He dressed. As he did, he caught a glimpse of something that lay under the bed, something that glittered in the candlelight. He reached for it and his fingers closed around something small and made of glass. He heard Fasha gasp and then he held what he’d found up in front of his face, a small vial. Another like the ones from Deephaven, with tiny words carefully etched into the glass, like the one he’d seen again in Tethis from the soap-maker’s house: The blood of the Funeral Tree , only this was one of the others. His heart beat faster.

Let them drink this and fall asleep. Whisper a name three times in their ear, so that name may become the object of their obsessions and desires .

Berren almost dropped it. ‘What? What is this?’ He stared at it and then at Fasha. She looked horrified.

‘I. . I. . I did not. .’

‘You tricked me! You ensorcelled me! And you call me the warlock’s boy!’

‘No!’ she cried. ‘No, I did not! Look!’ She lunged and grabbed Berren’s hand, forcing the vial up close to his face. ‘See! It’s full! My mistress. . she gave it to me, yes, and I could hardly refuse it to her face. But I didn’t use it! I would not. And you agreed to help, freely. Please!’ She clutched at him. ‘ Please! ’

Berren shook his head. ‘I would have hunted Kuy anyway.’

In a flash she grabbed the vial out of his hand and opened it and held it to her lips. She looked at him and then closed her eyes. ‘Berren, Berren,’ she breathed. ‘Say your name if you must. Say it for the third time.’

‘No!’ Berren grasped her hand and held it fast. ‘Go!’ he said. ‘Keep your freedom! Go and tell your mistress that you’ve done what you came to do. And if you’ve got any sense, you’ll throw that potion into the sea.’

After she was gone, Berren lay still. He gazed at the ceiling, lost in a reverie of bliss and remembered sensation. He only had to close his eyes and she was with him once again, her face aglow with lust, her eyes wide with desire. He lay there and dozed and thanked all the gods he knew, and tried to forget their vicious little twist with Kuy’s potion vial. After all, like she said, she hadn’t used it. She hadn’t .

And then later he got up and walked away and joined the Hawks as they marched out of their camp, as they turned towards the south and towards the war that the thief-taker had made.

The rains had made the roads hopeless for wagons, but Talon’s mules didn’t much care, and it seemed that the prince had quietly bought up every one of them for a hundred miles around. Each day the Hawks marched through rain and mud to the next nameless farming hamlet, and each one turned out to have half a cohort of men already shacked up in every barn, a mountain of dry firewood and enough food for the army to eat its fill. And so it went for a twelvenight and a day until they reached the outskirts of Galsmouth. By then word of their approach had raced ahead despite the rains and the atrocious roads. The garrison fled before them, and Talon had his first victory for nothing.