Full Circle (7 page)

Martine and Arvid moved to the side and looked at the town. Shuttered up tight; no one on the streets. Martine had been to
Mitchen many times before, and it was a town, like Turvite, that enjoyed its summer nights. This quiet readiness disturbed
her greatly.

“Have we heard from Apple and the others?” she asked the shipmaster.

“No, but I wouldn’t worry. We’ve made this trip a dozen times before. The merchants always stay late.”

“But they usually call for me to come to the dinner,” Arvid said, looking worried. “Holly, Beetle, on duty, now!”

His guards had been playing dice aft. They threw down the cup and sprang up, running to Arvid’s side.

“We’re going to check on the merchants,” Arvid said. “Stay close.”

“I’d better come,” Safred said, her eyes wide in the darkness, glinting in the light from the lantern hung on the mainmast.
“You might have need of me.”

The guards checked their weapons and settled their uniforms into place, then followed Arvid down the gangplank. “They’ll be
at the Moot Hall, most likely,” he said.

Safred went after them, and Martine followed. Arvid glanced back and saw her, and opened his mouth to order her back on board.
She could see the moment he realised he had no right to give her orders — particularly in a free town! — and closed his mouth
with some chagrin.

She smiled grimly. So. He didn’t like that. Serve him right for falling for an outsider.

His guards had moved into formation around them, hands on swords even though it was illegal in a free town for warlords’ men
to use weapons. Martine found herself glad of them, and reflected that it didn’t take much for even a Traveller to range herself
with the stronger party when danger threatened. If danger threatened.

Her Sight was showing her nothing. But many distressing things happened without Sight warning her. It was only when the gods
thought that the event was important that Sight intervened.

Walking through the silent town was unnerving, like a dream that was about to turn into a nightmare.

It was a relief to hear some noises coming from the centre, near the Moot Hall: voices, singing, shouting. They quickened
their pace.

Men’s voices, singing snatches of a drunken song: “Kill ’em all, kill ’em all!” they roared. It was the chorus of one of the
best-known songs about Acton. She expected to find a mob of burly blonds and red-heads sitting on the steps of the hall, swinging
their tankards.

They rounded the corner to the central square. There were no market stalls left here; they’d all been packed away, and the
eating houses were closed, as was the Moot Hall.

There were no people, either. The only sign of life was that the lanterns on the walls next to the Moot Hall doors had been
smashed and were dripping oil down the bricks.

The singing continued, from a road that led up and out of town.

Arvid hesitated. “We should ask at the hall,” he said.

Then the singing stopped and became shouting, and the sounds of crashing and splintering wood.

They ran, Holly and the other guards taking the lead, but Arvid not far behind. Safred and Martine kept pace. Martine’s heart
was thudding hard.

The shouting was getting louder.

“That’s right, you bastards, hide behind your bars and shutters! We’re going to get you all!”

“Thass it, you tell ’em, Bass!”

“Scared of
us
, now, aren’t you? Where’s your bloody Acton now, eh? Our people are comin’ back and you can’t stop us!”

“Look, Bass, lookee ’ere.”

“Show ’em how we can fight, Bass!”

“Take that, blondie!”

A woman screamed.

It was only a few more paces. They could see figures struggling, hear them gasping, panting.

Holly drew her sword as she ran and the others copied her, Arvid included.

Martine tried to sort it out in the meagre light leaking from between the shutters of the surrounding buildings. Four men,
five, six… two women. One of them was screeching and trying to pull two fighting men apart. The other hit her attacker
as he brought both hands down on her head. Was one of them Apple?

“Break them apart,” Arvid ordered, and Holly leapt into the struggling group and pulled one back, throwing him towards another
guard, who hit him and pushed him down to sit groggily, holding his head.

Arvid went in after Holly, ramming one tall figure with his shoulder, using the hilt of his sword under the man’s chin. He
crumpled on the spot. The other guards were equally efficient, pulling the combatants away one by one until there were six
separate men instead of a fight, and two women, one of them still swearing and the other lying still, legs sprawled.

Martine went to her, making room for Safred by her side. It was Apple, her blue eyes half-open, her knife lying in one slack
hand.

“Too late,” Safred said sadly. She turned immediately to lay her hands on another man who had a wound from Apple’s knife.
He was the only other one seriously hurt. Safred began to sing, the harsh song, the healing song.

Martine shivered and her eyes filled with tears as she closed Apple’s eyes and straightened her clothes. She thought of Snow,
Apple’s son, waiting for her to come home, and her heart clenched, her mind inevitably going to her own daughter, Elva, and
how she would feel in the same situation.

Arvid crouched beside her. “Drunken thugs,” he said bitterly. “Travellers, attacking anyone who came along.”

“Because they could,” Martine said. “For once, people were afraid of them.”

She turned and confronted the man who had killed Apple. Safred had finished. Martine looked at him. She could see him clearly,
now her eyes had adjusted to the light. No more than twenty, probably, and not too bright. A life spent looking at the ground
instead of in people’s eyes, in case they hit you or dragged you off to the warlord for insolence. A life spent being hated,
or despised, or overlooked. She should be filled with compassion for someone like this, who had been so warped by the hatred
of Acton’s people.

She spat in his face.

“You have become just like them,” she said. “You’ve let them win.”

Then she turned and walked away, back to the ship, and didn’t look to see if anyone followed.

A
SH’S SONG
ended and he cleared his throat, staring at Acton. Bramble had forgotten, again, that he was so big. Baluch and Ash were
tall men, and Medric was solidly muscled, but he dwarfed all of them, or seemed to.

Baluch moved towards him, and Medric followed, his mouth open in wonder at a childhood hero standing right there in front
of him. Ash stood next to her, glaring, bristling with hatred now that he confronted his people’s enemy. All Acton had to
do was stand there, Bramble thought, and he created followers and enemies just like that; his whole life had been the same.
Even Baluch had put loyalty over friendship — he would have obeyed Acton’s orders, she was sure, even if it had meant both
their deaths. Had Acton ever known anyone who wasn’t either follower or enemy?

As the ghosts of Turvite had been when Tern raised them, he seemed a little confused at first, and looked around, blinking.
His gaze passed over Medric, Baluch, Ash, and came to her. And then he smiled. Her heart turned over, because it was the smile
he had given her on the hillside, in the one moment where he and she had been alive in the same place at the same time, a
smile of promise, of complicity, of mischief and delight. It broke her heart, but she couldn’t help smiling back even while
she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. Curse him. She might not be his enemy any more, but she’d walk into the cold
hell on her own two feet before she’d be his follower, before she’d let him cozen her the way he’d cozened the girl on the
mountain. No matter how much she loved him.

Acton took a step towards her and she braced herself, unsure why. He was a ghost. He couldn’t touch, or talk, or… She
looked at Ash. “You can make them talk, can’t you?”

Ash nodded and moved in front of Acton. “Speak,” he said.

Acton’s face was clear, even in the dim light, as though he had merely been dusted with flour and the real man, hearty and
hale, was waiting underneath the pale covering. It made her want to weep.

“You can talk, now,” she said, wondering what he’d say.

“Am I dead, then?” Acton asked in the language of the past. She understood the words, after so long hearing them, but he spoke
in the healer’s voice, the prophet’s voice, rock on grating stone. Soul-destroying. Bramble trembled with revulsion and anger.
This was not
fair
!

Acton was startled by the sound, too, and closed his mouth firmly. He raised his hands apologetically and smiled at her, inviting
her to understand his silence. But she hadn’t gone through all this to not be able to talk to him.

“Ash,” she said. “Make him talk in his own voice.”

Ash looked at her with pity in his eyes. “I can’t. From the grave, all speak alike.”

It was a great disappointment, but she would have to deal with it. Acton was looking at Baluch, puzzlement all over his face.

Baluch came forward, moving quietly, like a man in a sick room, and stood in front of him. “You’ve been dead a very long time,”
he said gently, in the language they shared.

“Bal?” Acton said. His incredulity showed only in his face; the voice stayed as it was, stone. Baluch winced at the sound,
and then nodded. Acton grinned, looking him up and down in a mime of astonishment at how old he was, teasing.

Baluch smiled back, the boy he had been showing clearly through the wrinkles. “At least I got to be old,” he said. “They all
thought you’d been killed by a jealous husband somewhere. Why else would you ride out alone, but to some secret meeting with
a lover?”

Acton shook his head. “Not a lover.”

“Bramble says it was Asgarn.”

Acton turned to her. She could see his lips make the motions of saying her name, but he didn’t say it out loud, and she was
thankful for that. She didn’t want to hear her name in that terrible voice. But he spoke anyway, looking puzzled.

“By the way Baluch looks it’s been, what — sixty years or so? But you’re young.”

“A thousand years,” she said.

He blinked. “Swith the Strong! How —”

He looked at her with an assessing gaze, as he’d look at a stranger, as he’d looked at Tern the enchanter on the headland
outside Turvite. He mistrusted her. She had appeared just before his death and here she was a thousand years later, unchanged.
Of course he mistrusted her. But the look hurt.

She felt herself empty out, as though her ribs were a hollow ring around nothingness. If she let herself feel it, she would
break apart, bones clattering onto the weeping rocks. She would not show him weakness. He shielded weakness from harm, he
took responsibility for the weak, and she would rather he mistrusted her than have him feel paternal.

“There’s a lot to explain,” she said briskly. “But we can talk as we go. We have to get to Sanctuary.” She began to pack his
bones back into the saddlebags. The roan’s hairs were stuck to Acton’s skull with her blood. That seemed fitting, somehow,
and she left them there, turning the skull inward so the hairs wouldn’t rub off. She felt, irrationally, that the roan would
keep Acton safe, somehow.

“Wait,” he said, gazing at the bones in sudden understanding. “You raised my ghost?” He looked at Baluch, at Ash, at Medric.
“Why?”

“We don’t have time for this.” Bramble said. “We’ll explain on the way.”

“Really?” Ash asked dryly. “And do you know how to get out?”

“You got in,” she said. “Don’t you know the way?”

“The way we came, you can’t travel,” Baluch said.

Bramble pulled shut the drawstring on the bag and closed the flap. The scarf had absorbed the blood and was dry, although
the spots on her jacket were still wet. It was only her blood, not his; she put on her jacket and slung the bags over her
shoulder.

“I suspect,” she said, “that what guided you here knows the way.”

Baluch and Ash exchanged an unreadable look, and then she saw Baluch’s eyes go unfocused, the way the Well of Secrets looked
when she communed with the gods.

“Aye,” Baluch said slowly. “We will be guided.”

He had carefully avoided saying who would be guiding them, but Bramble would be willing to bet it was the Lake, somehow reaching
out. “Glad she’s on our side,” she said. Ash and Baluch looked startled, and she laughed.

She knew the others didn’t think it was funny, but she didn’t care. Grief and loss were walking beside her wearing the face
of a man a thousand years dead. The only way she could cope was to laugh. Then Acton grinned at her, his eyes lighting with
shared amusement at Baluch’s discomfiture, and the clench of muscles around her heart eased a little. She wasn’t so foolish
as to think he’d come to love her —
could
ghosts love? She knew that what she felt, she felt alone. But perhaps they could be comrades, at least.

Then she stumbled a little on the broken ground and Acton instinctively put out a hand to support her elbow.

She expected his hand to pass through her, but instead she came up with a jolt. He was solid. The cold of the burial caves
washed over her, crept up her arm from where he touched her and chilled her heart, but he was solid, like the enchanter’s
ghosts. He had touched her.

Ash looked astonished.

Acton let go of her slowly, staring at his own hand. He hadn’t expected this, either. “So…” he said, and his hand went
to where his sword should have hung. But he hadn’t taken it to that meeting with Asgarn a thousand years ago. He moved to
draw his belt knife instead, but it had fallen to the floor of the cave when Red had knifed him. He looked at Baluch. “I’ll
need weapons.”

Baluch smiled, slowly, and stepped forward to clasp forearms with Acton. They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment,
smiles growing. “We’ll find you a sword. You can take my knife until then.”

He handed over his belt knife.