The Bandit King (9 page)

“A pretty tale.” Her shoulders slumped, came up again to bear that burden, one far too heavy for her. “Which presents a pretty choice indeed.” Brittle, chill, and royal, the tone she had found so recently. A curl of dark hair feathered over her ear, loosening itself from the braids as if eager for my fingers. “Whatever alliance I have made will crumble, for I built it on the strength of my Consort and the loyalty of his father. If I cast aside the son, what will cement that loyalty?”

I could have laughed fit to wake the dead. My father’s loyalty would never be in question.

“Or,” she continued, “I could keep the son at my side, and wonder when the blade will find my own heart.”

Is that what you think?
The strength spilled out of me. I sat down hard in a clash of chains.

“I think we understand each other.” Her chin was still tilted up. Still no quarter asked, and would I beg for respite? Her dark eyes were terribly sad, and determined. “What dagger do you have reserved for me, once I no longer fit your plans? Once I am no longer your lure?”

Dear gods.
My mouth was dry as high summer in the Tifrimat wastes, where the sand burns itself to glass and sorcerous salamanders roam. Did she think I would strike at her? “Vianne—” A harsh croak, not even fit to be called her name.

“When, Tristan? When am
I
expendable?”

What? I would never… I could not.
Was that what she expected? How could she misjudge me so?

Except it was not a misjudgment. She was right to accuse me thus, though she may not have known how right. My heart turned traitor to match the rest of me and cracked inside my chest. “No.”

“That,” she observed, “is not an answer.” And with a swirl of her skirts, she turned as if truly meaning to leave me to the darkness.

She did not
believe
me.

“Vianne—”
Her name almost choked me. “Vianne, no.
No
.”

She paused next to the door, and there was a faint fading hope that she was merely playing her hand again, feinting at her exit to force a cry from me. She had never been one for those games at Court, and was even less now.

Her head turned slightly, that was all, and she spoke over her slim shoulder with a noblewoman’s air of dismissal. “I am reserving most of the papers di Narborre lost for another turn in the game. Sooner or later the Council will call for you, and I have no doubt you will be set free. I will not be able to avoid it.” She took in a sharp, sipping breath. “So. Plan my death well, should it come to that pass. For I would wish it to mean something.”

“Vianne—” The quick tongue I had never possessed when it came to her failed me utterly. “I—”

“I bid you farewell,” she said formally, and swept from the cell. The door clanged shut, the lock catching itself. Her footsteps faltered as she reached the end of the hall. Mayhap her vision was blurred with tears, the same tears that would be uselessly spent on a pillow or a kerchief instead of on my shoulder.

Her guard, whoever it was, said something in a low, fierce tone. Twas Jierre, and he had heard it all.

Dear gods.
I had never been one for prayer before, fashionably irreligious like most of the Court. Yet I found myself pleading, as if the Blessed were petty bureaucrats and I a supplicant for some sinecure or another.

The coldest part of me settled into its corner, the meat inside my skull nimbly running, running like a courser.
This is salvageable
, the cold part said.
She needs you. You will be free and able to prove yourself to her soon enough.

How long was I to cling to salvageable before I turned loose of such wreckage, opened my veins or took a draught of poison? No, poison was woman’s work, unfit for a nobleman. Falling on your sword was the accepted practice in Tiberian times.

The chains clattered like the cries of the Damarsene damned. There was no sword to fall on here. There was merely the ghost of her perfume, and something shifted inside me.

I was not ready to die just yet. I would cling to the wrack and ruin until until she sank the knife in my chest herself. There was nothing else.

The hour of dinner came and went. A long endless witchlit time, and I had lost all sense of hunger by what I judged to be morning. I lay on the cot, planning, the torch’s sorcery-fueled flame a living breath in the silence.

There were other components to that silence, too. I do not know just when it began, but of a sudden I became aware of a vibration in the stone walls. Had I not grown up in this Keep I would not have noticed.

What is that?
The instant I framed the question, I knew. A sick weakness filled my stomach.

It was the thunder of battle.

Dear gods.

Why had she not sent for me? Or had I been forgotten? It was not like Vianne to offer hope to a man, then snatch it away. She had said I would be freed.

Eventually.

If the city and the Keep fell before someone thought to come fetch my errant self, would I even be remembered? And my Vianne, alone in the midst of the fire and rapine of a citadel’s fall.

The thought brought me up with a clash of metal. I worked the stiletto free and drew forth the pins from the small hollow in its slim hilt. The cuff-locks were easy enough to coax open, working the pins in and slipping tumbler by tumbler; this requires only a great deal of patience and time undisturbed by a guard.

I had the latter in abundance, but the former wore thin.

I remembered the thief who had shown me this trick. Driath, remanded to the King’s justice for the murder of a drab, taught me much. As long as he had new skills to impart, he was safe from the noose.

But no man’s skill is infinite.

The day he hanged, I was in the crowd, safe in a ragged cloak and a broad-brimmed, battered drover’s hat. I do not think he remarked me. I saw his mouth move before they hooded him, but I am fairly certain it was not to curse my name. He had far greater reasons to curse, and had never expected me to save him.

At least, I hoped he had not.

The memory of his close filthy cell and his nasal whisper as he coached me in the ways of lock-tickling and other useful things rose as I worked. He did not teach me how to knife a man quietly, for by the time I came under his tutelage I had already learned that skill. He
did
teach me small tricks to make the knifing easier, and a thief’s way of hunting a victim, fat-pursed or not.

Of all my teachers, he was by far the calmest. Even then, I was cautious. I had learned, by then, not to turn my back on a man no matter how securely he was restrained.

Of such small habits and gentle lessons are a Left Hand made.

I was not
too
filthy. Unshaven, rank-smelling, yes. But at least I had possessed a slop-bucket. Once I freed myself of encumbrances, the next step was—

The cuffs parted and I hissed out through my teeth, rubbed-raw flesh underneath exposed to cruel air. Hedgewitchery may keep a body clean, but Court sorcery will not. It will not even mend the simplest of life’s daily annoyances.

The vibration in the Keep’s white stone walls, once attended to, was impossible to cease hearing. I eased the screeching door open and peered down the hall. The witchlight torches were sputtering; I had barely avoided being locked down here in the dark.

I did not take the route my parents and Vianne had, though the aching in my bones all but demanded I follow my Queen’s steps. Yet I would not serve her best by being an idiot. When next I appeared to her, it would have to be in such a manner that my actions were unquestionably
loyal
.

So I turned, and plunged deeper into the Keep’s recesses.

I do not think another living soul could tread the route I took from donjon-dark to the West Tower. I was somewhat taller and broader at the shoulder than I had been the last time I retreated in this manner—twelve, and fleeing
Père
’s wrath. As usual.

My son must be above even the appearance of such things!

And my mother, in her gentle way:
Perseval, he is a boy.
Intercession I craved and was shamed of at once, for a man does not hide behind a woman’s skirts.

That was something my father said often as well.

So it was a collection of dusty half-remembered passages, navigating by memory and touch in some dark places, until I found the spiraling, forgotten stone stairs rising through the disused part of the West Tower. There was precious little chance of attack from this quarter since the Keep’s back was to the cliffs, but my father would have posted guard in the parts of the Tower still accessible from other areas of the Keep.

He believed in being thorough.

Three-quarters of the way up the Tower was a gallery where I could see the Keep and the city below. This would give me valuable information—and also, in that gallery, there would be water. At least, if the pipes had not been blocked in the intervening years.

Vianne.

I pushed up the trapdoor, wincing as it groaned. The gallery was empty, and my legs threatened to shake as I emerged into dusk. Time moves strangely to the imprisoned, and I was faintly shocked to find the sunlight dimming.

The roar of battle was much more pronounced. I hauled myself out and lay on the gallery’s dust-choked floor, breathing heavily and staring at the lavender sky through tall narrow windows shielded by rotting wooden eaves.

When my lungs finally bore more resemblance to flesh than leather bellows, I dragged myself upright and crossed the gallery, shuffling through a thick carpet of dust. None of the windows were broken—this face of the tower was relatively sheltered—but a few were cracked, and all were dirty. It took much careful peering and polishing before I fully grasped what I saw.

Below, the other towers of the Keep jutted like white spears. The city of Arcenne huddled, a thicket of burning inside its confining walls. The
Quartier Gieron
blazed. The eastron half was all a-smolder, and the strip of di Roncail’s Orchard—so it was called, though there had not been a Roncail alive for a good fifty years—along the wall was aflame with fire instead of blossom. The East Tower, its angle providing enfilade fire with the battlements and its back to a high-shouldered cliff, flew a tattered red flag proudly, the mountain-pard of Arcenne clawing defiantly as the pennant flapped. The West Tower, more vulnerable because of the fields at its foot and the wall connecting it to a similar rock-face rising to cradle the city, flew our colors as well. The siege engines were not so numerous there, because there was merely a postern instead of a great gate piercing the stone wall. Still, rick, cot, and tree between the westron wall and the edge of the Alpeis in the distance were ablaze. Their owners might be inside the walls, but the damage would be immense, and the winter a lean one.

A pall of smoke hung over the market district; I knew the wells were deep and the summer had not been dry, but a long, fiery siege would not help. Food would be the most acute concern, then disease.

All the more reason to find Vianne and take her from this place, no matter what she thought of my trustworthiness.

The attackers had not breached the city yet, but the siege engines—mangonels and the like—lobbed Graecan fire in high crimson-orange arcs. Sorcery sparked, rising from the walls in thin veils—Court sorcery and some leaf-green traceries of hedgewitchery, though most of the hedgewitches would be tending wounded and damping the fires inside the city.

There
. On the walls over the main gate, a shifting globe of silvery witchlight, clearly visible even at this distance.

Of course she would be there. In absolutely the most vulnerable place in the entire gods-be-damned city. It was my father’s place to be at the walls, but of
course
my
d’mselle
would not listen to reason.

I almost,
almost
sent my filthy fist through a pane of ancient, rippling, dusty glass. Control reasserted itself, and I took a deep breath.

Weapons. And a means of moving undetected. Though likely none will pay attention to you, not with an army at the gates and fire everywhere. Why not simply steal a horse and force your way to her side?

I considered this, my fevered forehead pressed against the pane. Grit and the coolness of glass, and my pulse a frantic tattoo in my throat and wrists.

Why not indeed.

*   *   *

Night in a besieged city is rather like the Damarsene underworld, especially when the attackers possess sorcery. Flames rose, screams echoed, horses added their own cries, dogs howled. The men had been called to the walls; women, children, and old men either hid or were called to fire duty. Smoke and the reek of fear in every corner, but twas not as bad as I’d feared, seeing it from above.

The walls were holding. There was no chance to gather news; I was occupied enough in avoiding the fires and working my way toward the Gates. No street in Arcenne is straight; they are a jumbled patchwork, an additional defense for the Keep. Where Vianne
should
have been, watching the battle from afar. It should have been my father on the walls, braving death and rallying the defense.