Себастьян Кастелл - Traitor's Blade

‘Got you, Trattari bastard,’ the senior constable cried as he fell backwards into Tremondi’s room.

There was a yell behind me and I turned, cursing at the pain shooting through my leg, to find one of the remaining constables had his pike aimed squarely at my chest and was ready to strike. I swung my sword arm towards the pike, knowing it wouldn’t be fast enough, only to see the shaft of an arrow appear through the man’s neck. He fell to the ground in front of me and I looked around to see where the next attack would come from – but there was no next attack. There were two other bodies on the ground with arrows in them next to the two I had slain, and the three remaining men were lying dead or wounded by Kest’s blade.

‘The crossbows have stopped,’ he said, stepping out from under the awning.

‘That means they’re coming back down. Time to go.’

‘That was a good idea, Falcio, covering Brasti so he could get to his bow. I hadn’t thought of that.’

I leaned my hand on his shoulder, taking some of the weight off my wounded leg. ‘Kest, next time you think the most optimistic outcome possible is everyone but you dying, try to think harder, okay?’

We joined Brasti and the horses at the other end of the courtyard and I thanked Saint Shiulla-who-bathes-with-beasts that the horses hadn’t been hit during the fight. While Brasti went to recover his arrows, I wondered out loud who had set this up.

‘Gods, Kest, when did it become so easy to believe the worst in us?’

‘Times have changed, Falcio,’ he said, pointing behind me.

I turned to see Brasti, reclaimed arrows in one hand, searching the bodies of the fallen men with the other.

‘Brasti, stop stealing from the constables,’ I shouted.

He looked sullen, but nonetheless ran to his horse. ‘Fine,’ he grumbled. ‘Wouldn’t want to take anything from the nice men who were just doing their jobs trying to kill us.’ He hopped up on his brown mare. ‘I mean, that wouldn’t just be dishonourable. It would be – oh my Gods and Saints – impolite .’

‘Interesting,’ Kest said, taking the reins and pulling his horse around.

‘What?’ Brasti asked.

Kest pointed at me. ‘I’ve just realised: he talks too much before a fight and you talk too much after. I wonder what it means?’

He kicked his horse and took off down the street, Brasti following behind. I looked back at the dead men on the ground and wondered how long the Greatcoats could last before we became what people said we were: Trattari.

The second worst feeling in the world happens when your body discovers that yet again it’s about to get into a fight for its life. Muscles start to clench, you start to sweat, you start to smell (luckily, nobody ever notices that at the time) and your stomach sinks down to your nether regions.

But the first worst feeling in the world is when your body realises the fight is over. Your muscles start to give out, your head throbs, you keep sweating and – oh yes, you notice the smell. Last but not least, you realise there’s a crossbow bolt sticking out of your thigh. It was the crossbow bolt that finally forced me to stop.

‘It’s going to have to come out,’ Brasti said sagely, looking down from the rooftop where he was scouting for the constables.

I could have killed him, but that would require asking my body to repeat the whole cycle again and, frankly, I smelled bad enough as it was. We had found ourselves a decent alleyway with two exits to hole up in for a breather. The horses didn’t like trying to race around corners on cobbled streets, and we needed to deal with my leg.

Kest looked at me. ‘Punch-pull-slap?’

I sighed. It hurt. ‘I don’t suppose we have time to find a doctor, do we?’

Brasti climbed back down from the roof of the building. ‘They’re doing a house-to-house. The men don’t look all that eager to find us, but the head guy – the senior constable, the one who shot you – is pushing them hard. It’s only going to be a matter of minutes before they get to this alley.’

Damn . ‘Punch-pull-slap,’ I said, already dreading it. ‘But make it hard this time, Brasti.’

Kest poured water on the wound, making me whistle through my teeth.

‘Just don’t scream this time,’ Brasti said. ‘We’re trying to avoid being caught.’

While I prayed to Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears to come down just this one time and meet my good friend Brasti, Kest got a firm grip on the shaft and then nodded at Brasti.

The three of us invented ‘punch-pull-slap’ some time ago. One of the things you discover after you’ve been wounded enough times is that the body really only keeps track of one source of pain at a time. So, for example, if your tooth hurts and someone pokes you in the stomach, your body momentarily forgets about the tooth.

So the way this is supposed to work is like this: Brasti punches me in the face, Kest pulls the arrow out of my leg and then Brasti slaps me so hard my brain never has time to register the bolt and therefore I don’t scream at the top of my lungs.

I screamed at the top of my lungs.

‘ Shhh! You need to keep quiet, Falcio,’ Brasti said, leaning in and wagging a finger at me. ‘They might hear that. You need to toughen up.’

‘I told you to hit me hard!’ I said, watching the stars form in my vision.

‘I hit you as hard as I could from that angle. Kest was in the way.’

‘You hit like a girl.’

Kest stopped bandaging my leg and said, ‘Almost a third of King Paelis’ Greatcoats were women. You trained most of them. Didn’t they hit hard enough?’

It was a fair point, but I wasn’t in the mood for semantics. ‘They hit like angry bloody Saints. Brasti hits like a girl,’ I grumbled, holding onto the end of the bandage while Kest padded the wound.

‘So I suppose we’re off to Baern, then?’ Brasti asked.

I pushed myself up. The leg felt a lot better with the bandage on tight: a throbbing pain instead of a burning one. ‘It’s that or stay here and try to teach you how to not hit like a girl.’

‘Falcio, if you say that again, I’ll punch you myself,’ Kest said.

‘It’s just a phrase, “you hit like a girl.” Everyone says it. It’s funny.’

He handed me back my rapier. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it just sounds absurd.’

‘It’s funny because it’s absurd,’ I replied.

Brasti slapped me on the back. ‘Don’t pay him any mind, Falcio. He lost his sense of humour the day he learned to swing a sword.’

Oddly, since Brasti had no way of knowing it, he was absolutely right.

I mentioned that my mother and I lived on the outskirts of our town, which bordered another town named Luth. There was a wooden marker between the two, and Kest and I met there as boys when we were both around eight years old. I was very poor, with no father and no prospects, other than a possible future as the village idiot. Kest Murrowson was the child of a wonderful mother who worked as a healer and a father who was the town smith. Kest told jokes all the time – thereby putting me to shame even for the role of village idiot – but he never made fun of me for being poor or not having a father, and that instantly qualified him to be my best friend. He was a gentle boy who didn’t like to hunt or fish and never wanted to play with swords. I, on the other hand, was going to be a Greatcoat one day, just like in Bal’s stories.

Kest’s father made some of the best swords in the region, and he had learned fighting ways in the wars with Avares, the country to the west that is populated by barbarians who occasionally gang up and make their way across the mountains and try to raid us the way they do their own people. They lose every time because our troops can fight war-style, in units, while theirs just sort of run at you shouting and pissing on themselves as they try to cleave your skull with whatever is handy.