The Copper Promise (26 page)

‘You can fight them!’ screamed Wydrin. She kicked the wounded Roki, who was staring at his severed hand in shock, and ran to a nearby stall. She climbed on top of it and pointed at the merrily burning building with her bloody dagger. ‘There are more of you, and
they’re
just men. Fight them!’

A handful of guards fled from the barracks, all of them aflame. One dropped to the floor and rolled in the dirt, trying to put the fire out, but whatever chemicals Frith had used ensured it was not so easy. As Sebastian drew his own sword, a stout middle-aged woman ran to the guard on the ground and put a long-pronged hayfork through his chest. A few seconds later and other townspeople were getting the same idea. Men and women grabbed hoes and scythes and makeshift spears. Sebastian saw one heavy-set man stumble out of the crowd with a meat cleaver in his fist, his apron brown with old blood. The guards who had not been in the barracks had joined together at the end of the market, short swords at the ready. They looked nervous.

He brandished his sword at the townspeople.

‘I am with you!’ he shouted. ‘For Pinehold!’

There was a bloody slaughter then, fast and terrible. Fane took one look and ran, heading straight for the Queen’s Tower. The townspeople howled for his blood, and near rushed after him but a second group of guards headed them off. Sebastian cut through them swiftly, his superior training breaking every defence and sending each attack to its intended mark. His shoulders burned as though he’d been fighting for hours, but when he looked to the Queen’s Tower and saw it still standing, he knew it had only been minutes. Wydrin appeared at his shoulder, the goggles pushed back onto her forehead.

‘That,’ she said cheerfully, ‘is what you get for trusting in enchanted armour.’

‘The tower,’ he said. They found themselves in a brief empty space as the battle moved across the marketplace behind them. ‘It has yet to fall. Have you seen Frith?’

Wydrin looked around them. The young lord with his shock of white hair should have been easy to spot. She frowned, pulled the leather goggles down over her eyes again and said, ‘Show me where he is.’ She looked around the market slowly, and when she finally got to the tower she swore very loudly.

‘The stupid bastard’s still in there!’

‘He can’t be.’

‘I can bloody see him, all lit up like a whore’s bedroom!’ She tapped the glass for emphasis. Immediately she made to run for the tower. Sebastian grabbed hold of her arm.

‘There’s no time!’

She shook him off and pelted away, shouting over her shoulder as she went. ‘I’m faster than you. Win the day out here or I shall want to know the reason why!’

Fane elbowed his way past the guards at the main door of the tower. They were both staring beyond him, jaws slack with surprise, spears held loosely in their hands. No doubt their nostrils were full of the chemical stench too, and the light from the fire now burning out of control in the centre of town had thrown up an eerie glow against the fast-approaching darkness.

It was time to get out. Everything had gone to hell.

Fane could scarcely believe it happened so quickly, but he’d not survived so long without knowing when it was sensible to run, and that was just what he intended to do. There were a few valuables in the tower, some documents he couldn’t be without, and then he’d take the last of the guards, and Roki, if he was still alive, and make for some other godforsaken town in this mouldering forest.

One of the guards caught at his arm as he passed.

‘My lord, what is happening?’

Fane pushed him away, and then shoved him against the wall for emphasis.

‘Gather what you can from the storerooms and make ready to leave. We’ll look for the vault elsewhere.’

The last Lord Frith, if indeed that’s who he was, could rot for all he cared. No doubt he was deep within the Blackwood by now, taken in by some dreadful peasants who thought he was their saviour. Perhaps he would become a local legend, the long-lost lord haunting the forest and waiting for his chance to return. Fane’s lips quirked into a smile at the thought; the idea rather entertained him.

Inside the tower he sprinted up the stone steps, moving with a speed that belied his size, and as he did so he passed one of the rooms they’d turned over to the torturer. The door was half open, which was unusual, and a strange red light spilled out on to the flagstones.

‘Rin? If you’re in there, grab your knives. It’s time to leave this piss-pot hole.’

Fane pushed open the door. The instinct that had been whispering at him to run suddenly screamed in his ear. He shuffled a few steps back, his legs heavy and unresponsive.

The young Lord Frith turned to look at him. There was blood on his cheek, almost black against his dark skin. There was blood on his hands, up to his elbows, in fact, and there was blood in the air, floating like a heavy mist and turning the light from the oil lamps crimson. Beyond him Yellow-Eyed Rin hung suspended above the floor, although yellow was no longer the colour he brought to mind.

‘You,’ said Frith in a flat voice. He dropped the scalpel he’d been holding. ‘Perhaps you could tell me where the Lady Bethan is? It turns out Rin doesn’t like answers nearly as much as he likes questions. I have a friend like that, you know.’

Fane’s hand hovered over the hilt of his sword, uncertain. He could cut down the slim man in front of him in a few strokes, but the power in the room that was holding Rin and his instruments in the air was a palpable presence, thundering and dangerous.

‘YOU WILL ANSWER ME!’

Frith watched Fane’s retreating back as he turned and continued his flight up the steps, and all at once the force that had been holding everything up in the air departed. There was a soft pattering as the blood that had so entertainingly flowed from Rin’s body to hang in droplets came back down, falling on the flagstones like rain.

Somewhere behind the fog of rage Frith knew there was something he should be doing, a place
he
needed to be
, but the sight of Fane’s broad shoulders vanishing around the curve of the spiral staircase was more than he could take. No, he would make time for this. Could he let the killer of his father and brothers just
run away
? Unwanted, an image of Tristan rose in his mind, bloodied and broken. Tristan, who had only just started training with a wooden sword, who still needed a lamp by his bedside to get to sleep at night.

There would be time, or else he would go down with the tower.

He ran up after him, following the sound of his rapid footsteps into a wider, more spacious room. For a few seconds Frith was disorientated as memory and sight folded and doubled; this was the old jarl’s study, where he had once taken tea and slightly stale bread with his father, an eon ago. The bookcases were empty now and the tapestries were gone, but there were the same tall glass doors looking out onto the small stone balcony, and the same high-backed chair where his father had sat.

Fane was dragging bags of coins from the desk and shoving them into a leather pack. He glanced up at Frith, and his face twitched with a mixture of irritation and apprehension.

‘You and I are done, Frith. You want gold? Take it. There’s enough here for you to start a new life somewhere else.’ His lip curled. ‘Bethan should have made sure you were dead. Never leave a woman to do a man’s work.’

‘We are far from done.’ Frith drew his sword. So it would be this way then. He might not be able to control the power of the mages, but thanks to the healing properties of the lake he could wield a sword with skill again. ‘You killed my family, tortured them, destroyed our home.’

‘I did not.’

Frith’s grip on his sword tightened until it hurt.

‘You ordered it! Why? Why even come here?’

‘Why? Because you were rich, and I was not. Or, at least, not as rich as I wished to be, and that’s all that matters really.’ He shoved the last of the coin purses into the pack and slung it over his shoulder. The black rusted helm he’d been carrying in the market was on the desk, and he took it and slipped it over his head so that his brown eyes were narrow and sly. As Frith watched, the rough metal began to glow with the same shapes as those embedded in the gauntlets of the Children of the Fog. Fane grinned.

‘You seek to frighten me with your pretty armour?’ spat Frith, although in truth he was unnerved. Fighting three or four of this large man would be no easy task.

‘Can you guess what it does?’ asked Fane. He drew the sword hung at his side and launched into an immediate attack. He didn’t split and shimmer to become two or three people, and the move was clumsy and obvious. Frith parried it with ease and swept in with a swift stab at the man’s shoulder. To his surprise, Fane spread his arms wide and let him pierce him with the sword; he felt the point of his blade sink into yielding flesh and hit bone beneath. Confused by the ease of his victory Frith withdrew, only to watch the wound close up without spilling a drop of blood. Fane’s grin grew even wider.

‘It is a fine trick, is it not? My blood can only be spilled in honour of Bezcavar, and the power he grants for that is great.’

And then Fane lunged, fighting with the fury and recklessness of a man who knows he cannot be injured. His sword flew through the air, again and again, until it was all that Frith could do to defend himself, let alone cut the outlaw to pieces. He was turned around, forced beyond the desk to the glass doors of the balcony. Fane was grinning, a thin line of saliva leaking from his stretched lips, when there was a meaty thud and his relentless smile faltered. The big man turned slightly to reveal the hilt of a dagger protruding from his shoulder. Wydrin stood in the door to the room, the strange goggles pushed up onto her forehead, making her hair stick up on end. She ignored Fane and glared at Frith.

‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’

‘The helm, it makes him—’

‘We don’t have time for this!’

She ran past Fane without another glance and shoved Frith through the glass doors, which crashed open. Some of the panels fell out and smashed to the floor.

‘Unhand me, woman!’ cried Frith. ‘I
must
kill him, don’t you see? I must—’

‘Even if it means your death? You idiot!’

She pulled Frith up to the balcony ledge, and that was when a tremendous roar filled the air. For a brief second Frith thought of the terrible dragon that had emerged from the ruins of the Citadel, and then the entire tower seemed to lurch under his feet. There was a thunderous, ear-splitting screech as tons of masonry suddenly found that its foundations had turned to powder.

‘You owe me one,’ said Wydrin, before taking his arm and jumping from the tower.

Later, much later, when Wydrin tried to recall the leap from the Queen’s Tower, she found she could only remember fragments, like the brightly coloured pieces of a broken vase.

And when she faltered over the telling of the tale her audience would normally call loudly for the truth, convinced that not even the notoriously reckless Copper Cat would jump from such a distance, and eventually Wydrin learned to grin and do what she was best at; order another round of drinks, and make the rest up.

In truth, privately she would pore over the details that were left to her and marvel that they survived at all. She remembered a great cloud of dust rising up from the base of the tower as the bottom section crumbled, a plume of grey smoke covering them like a shroud. She remembered holding tight to Frith’s arm, his touch warm and solid, and then she lost him, unable to keep a hold as the ground approached. She remembered the scent of fire and the evening sky lit with stars, and a jarring impact that forced the hilt of her own dagger into her stomach, winding her badly, and the sudden lightness of her head as the Secret Keeper’s goggles flew off to shatter elsewhere. And then there was, thankfully, the golden smell of hay in her nostrils.

‘Of all the luck,’ said Crowleo for possibly the tenth time. Wydrin had lost count. ‘You couldn’t have known there would be something there to break your fall.’

They were seated around a table in The Alynn’s Pride, with several plates of fresh meat and vegetables steaming away in front of them and more tankards of ale than even Wydrin could safely drink. Pinehold was free and prosperous once more.

The commotion had taken some time to calm down, with many of the townspeople believing that Fane himself had destroyed the Queen’s Tower, and although all the guards had been killed or driven from the town in the ensuing chaos, a number of people had died in the fighting. Initially, there were those who demanded the three adventurers be taken prisoner, for reckless endangerment if nothing else, until Dreyda had stepped forward and quietly explained everything. Wydrin had been impressed with that. The Regnisse had an icy, precise manner that dampened the outrage and turned the townspeople friendly, grateful even. Now Frith wore a fine bearskin cloak with a silver pin, and at her hip Wydrin had a brand new short sword. It was fine work, the blade as sharp as a winter chill, and the pommel glittered with a piece of the blue crystal they’d salvaged from the Secret Keeper’s broken goggles. They had been unable to find Ashes, her beloved dagger, amongst the wreckage of the tower; much like the body of Fane. Equally, there was no sign of Roki, although a few of the townspeople claimed to have seen him running through the southern gate shortly after the explosion, cradling what was left of his hand.

‘Luck? Skill and forward thinking, more like,’ she said, waving a chicken leg for emphasis. ‘I took note of the hay carts beneath the tower as I ran towards it, of course. It’s not my fault you are so unobservant.’

Next to her, Dreyda coughed with laughter.

‘Born under lucky words,’ she said. ‘I knew it as soon as I saw you.’

There were a few moments of silence then. Wydrin looked at Sebastian. He’d taken a number of small injuries in the fighting, but it had been days since the tower had fallen and he still looked ill and withdrawn. His smiles were brief things, like the sun poking through on an overcast day, and he seemed to have little energy for conversation, instead making the occasional comment and looking away. She was worried about him.