Stephen Deas - The King's assassin

The soap-maker went back behind the crates and returned holding a boy, a few years old, sleeping like his mother. Gelisya smiled. ‘They won’t wake for hours. We’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come, you see, but I didn’t know how long it would take you. The knife tells me things, but not everything. Saffran said you held it yourself, once. Did it talk to you?’

‘Yes, it did.’ Berren swung Fasha over his shoulder and picked up the boy with his other arm. ‘You don’t need me for Syannis. You can clearly deal with him yourself.’

‘You’re right.’ Now and then when she spoke, there were sing-song traces of the child he remembered. ‘It’s almost better this way. I might even thank you.’

‘Aimes was a mistake. An accident.’ He gave Gelisya a nod and made to leave. ‘But you got what you wanted. All debts are paid then.’ Warlocks. Tethis. This little girl-witch. Syannis. He despised them, loathed them, all of them, and the sooner he was away the better. Far, far away.

‘No.’

He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Gelisya was still sitting in her circle of candlelight. She was pointing the knife at him. Her eyes were large and black.

‘No, murderer,’ she said. ‘All debts are far from paid. And I still have a tiny little piece of you in here. Which makes me pleased because it means I can do whatever I like!’

Her fingers tightened around the knife and an unearthly pain split Berren’s head in two, white-hot and unbearable. He sank to his knees. Fasha slipped from his arms.

‘You killed my father,’ whispered Gelisya. ‘You murdered him. You shot him in the back of his head. So no, murderer, all debts are not paid. Vallas, Syannis is on his way here. Go up and guide him to us. And tell your brother he can stop skulking and hiding. This one’s all his whenever he wants him.’

Dimly, Berren saw the soap-maker bow. He’d got it all wrong. She wasn’t their puppet, she was their mistress ! ‘Who are you?’ he croaked.

‘I am the Princess Gelisya.’ The pain grew stronger. She smiled. ‘ Queen Gelisya now, thanks to you. You can call me Your Majesty if you like. For as long as you’re alive.’

Berren gritted his teeth. ‘You’re not a queen yet.’ Then every nerve inside his head shrieked at once and the world went mercifully black.

When Berren woke up, the pain was gone and so was his sword. His hands were bound together. He was still in the hold exactly where he’d fallen. Fasha lay on the floor beside him, murmuring softly in her sleep.

‘Look!’ said Gelisya.

Berren craned his head to see her. She was sitting as he remembered, but now there was someone else inside the circle of candles with her. Syannis. Lying curled up with his head on her lap while she stroked his hair. Berren stared, struggling to believe what he was seeing. ‘Sun and moon! What have you done to him?’ He looked terrible. Gaunt and ragged and utterly, utterly lost.

‘Look,’ said Gelisya again, ‘look, my little puppy. I woke the murderer up again. What a long sleep! We all went up on deck to see what was happening at the castle and we only just came back. Imagine, you might have woken all alone. Oh!’ She put on a mock frown. ‘Wait! But the knife wouldn’t let you. Not until I say so. Syannis, why don’t you help him to his knees?’

As though in great pain, Syannis rose. He stepped out of the circle and hauled Berren up. The candles, Berren realised, had nearly burned out.

‘You shouldn’t have hurt my beloved,’ he said. ‘ We shouldn’t have hurt her. Either of us.’

Berren stared at him, filled with fury and fear and bloody-minded disbelief. ‘I didn’t touch her!’ he spat. He didn’t recognise this man at all. The thief-taker he’d loved and hated and feared and admired and envied, that man was gone. What was left was a shell.

‘We took her father away.’ His face was a mask of anguish.

Berren tore his eyes away from the thief-taker’s empty face. ‘What have you done to him?’

Gelisya smiled and showed her teeth. She pointed the knife and Berren felt a slight tingle inside his skull, enough to make him flinch. ‘I told you. A little cut here, a little cut there. Poor Syannis, you so nearly understood, but all the time you thought that Saffran was going to make your little brother better for you, and it was always a lie. Wasn’t it, Saffran?’

An old familiar shape pushed out from the darkness behind her. Not the soap-maker this time, but Saffran Kuy. ‘You!’ Berren was shaking.

‘Hello, little Berren-piece. Do you still wear my crystal nice and tight and close?’

Berren pulled at the ties around his wrists. ‘I will kill you, warlock. I will.’

Kuy let out a little cackle. ‘I’ve already seen who will kill me, little Berren-piece. I told you, years ago. Not you.’

For a moment Gelisya glared. ‘Saffran knows how to make the knives work properly .’ She bared her teeth at Berren. ‘Stupid Aimes sent him away before he showed me, so I had to work it all out for myself.’ She shrugged. ‘It would have been the easiest thing in the world to get rid of you when you were in my Pit, but he just wouldn’t do it, even though he was so, so in love with me!’

She clapped her hands together and made a face. ‘But now Saffran is back and so are you, and it’s all the way it was supposed to be, and Syannis is my little puppy again, aren’t you, my love? You do what I say. We’ll get it done right this time. No need to be rid of you after all. But we will need to deal with that other brother. I’m afraid you’ll have to do that. He’s going to come here.’

A coldness spread through Berren’s gut. The anger he’d nursed all these years thinking Syannis had betrayed him, and it hadn’t been Syannis at all. .

‘You do love me, don’t you? Of course you do.’ Gelisya smiled again, then her face hardened. ‘Now kill my servant woman! I don’t like her any more.’

Berren’s heart nearly stopped. Syannis looked up at Gelisya. ‘Why, my love? What is her crime?’

‘Does it matter? Do you have to question everything ? I said kill her!’ she snapped. ‘Make it bloody. She told him her name and let him have her. I don’t want her any more and I want him to see her die. Have Vallas weigh her down and throw her into the sea and her little bastard too. Make him watch. But send the guards below decks. I don’t want them to see you do that — they won’t like it. And then. . No, wait!’

Her eyes widened and she waved the gold-hafted knife so that it made patterns in the air, then squealed with delight. ‘No, not the bastard. Let Vallas make him into soap! And you, Crown-Taker, you get to watch and then you can be Saffran’s little plaything. He has plans for you, don’t you, Saffy? Had them for a long time. You’re going to be someone that matters. Or what’s left of you, once the Black Moon is inside you. And we all know what you did, murderer .’

Syannis turned to Berren. He looked desolate. ‘You killed Aimes,’ he said.

Berren nodded. Syannis’s hands were quivering above his swords and Berren knew how fast he could be. Behind his back, Berren’s hands strained at the ropes that bound them.

‘I thought you were him,’ Syannis said. His voice was slurred. ‘Back at the start, when I found you in Deephaven, I thought you were him. Saffran said he’d put him inside you to keep him safe, and that’s why you looked so alike. But you weren’t. You were a nothing, a nobody whose face simply looked the same.’ Instead of a sword he drew out another golden knife, exactly the one Berren remembered, the exact twin of the knife Gelisya still held.