Traitor's Blade

THE SOFT CANDY

It was morning in Rijou. Although it was still cold, the light felt harsh enough that wherever it struck it seemed to make the stink rise from the gutters along the pavement.

‘That was stupid,’ Aline said.

I looked down at her for a moment before turning right to head east along the broad street called Pikeman’s Way.

‘That was stupid.’

‘Which part?’

‘All of it,’ she said. ‘But for right now, the stupidest part is that we’re walking away in broad daylight and any of them can see where we’re going.’

‘They’re fools and cowards,’ I said. ‘There’s not one of them will come looking for us. We’ll keep to the east and make for the Wood-carvers’ District. There won’t be much happening there during the Blood Week and there are a lot of places to hide.’

‘It was still stupid,’ she said, ignoring me.

‘How many times are you going to say that?’

She stopped and grabbed me by the sleeve of my coat, trying to turn me around. I decided it was time to clarify who was in charge.

‘Look—’

Her face was full of tears.

‘Why are you—?’

‘Because I’m scared! Can’t you see that? Don’t you ever get scared?’

I knelt down, trying to talk to her at eye level, but she was too tall for that, so I got up again and leaned down to her – it was remarkably awkward, and it made what I said next sound even more foolish. ‘I’m scared all the time, Aline. I’m scared right now. But we’ve got to move on and find a place—’

‘You’re not!’ Her voice was half-shriek and half-growl, and it made me take a step backwards. It was early enough that there was no one else about, but I was still worried someone living above the nearby shops might take notice.

‘You’re not,’ she said, more quietly. ‘No one who was afraid would do something as stupid as you did back there. Those people could have helped us.’

‘Those people weren’t—’

She threw her arms up and down in a gesture of frustration and futility. ‘Those people weren’t Greatcoats, but they could have helped us. They could have given us a place to stay, they might have looked out for us, even just given us money or contacts. Something! Anything!’

‘I understand that it’s hard, but you don’t understand everything that’s at play here,’ I started, but she interrupted me.

‘No, Falcio val Mond of the Greatcoats, it’s you who doesn’t understand. You don’t understand what it is you’re doing.’ She spoke with all the assurance of a young girl who still thinks life should play out like a storyteller’s romance.

But I was tired, and aching from more fights in two days than I’d fought in the last year. ‘I’m trying to keep you alive, damn it!’

‘No,’ she said, quietly, calmly, ‘you’re trying to get back at them all – Shiballe, the Duke, that woman who calls herself a Princess: everyone who doesn’t believe in you and your Greatcoats.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘If I was out to hurt them, believe me, I could find lots of ways that would be less work and less dangerous.’

‘But that would be revenge, wouldn’t it? Or assassination? I’m just an excuse for you to fight all these people you hate and beat as many of them as you can before one of them finally kills you and you can die feeling noble and heroic.’

‘I wish I had the time to stand here and listen to you berate me, little girl, but I’m afraid I have to try and keep you alive now,’ I said pettishly.

‘Then do that! Stop picking fights with everyone you meet and find a way for us to survive this!’

‘Fine,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘And how exactly do you think we should go about it?’

‘I don’t know! I’m thirteen years old. I’m not supposed to know how to stay alive while everyone is trying to kill me. You’re supposed to be— You’re supposed to know how to do that.’ And with that she started crying uncontrollably.

I reached out to her, but she pushed my hand away and we stood there in silence, her sobs the only sounds punctuating the emptiness of the street.

Finally I said quietly, ‘I don’t know how.’

She looked up from her crying and said, ‘I know.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how we can do it. It’s not— I thought it was possible, but this city – it lives on murder and deceit. I don’t know how many are after us, or why, but I do know Shiballe can get anyone in this city to do what he wants. This whole place – the people … It’s practically designed for murder.’

‘I’m going to die, aren’t I?’ she said stoically.

I didn’t want to say it; it would serve no purpose. Even vain hope is still hope, and some reason to keep moving. But somehow it felt wrong to lie just then. This girl had lost her family, and she would soon lose her life, all for no purpose other than the machinations of men who gave less thought to this than to what wine they drank at dinner. She had the right to choose whether to face or hide from the world as it really was.

‘Yes, they’re going to find us,’ I said quietly. ‘One or more of them is going to catch us. And yes, they’re going to kill us.’

She looked at the ground, then she shook herself and looked back at me, her eyes clear. ‘I’m ready then,’ she said.

I shook my head as if to clear it. I wasn’t sure what she meant, and I wasn’t sure what else to say.

‘I want you to do it,’ she said firmly.

‘Do what?’

‘Kill me.’ She saw my reaction and immediately put her hand on my chest before I could turn away. ‘You have to. You don’t know what I know, Falcio. They won’t just kill me on the spot. They’ll take me and they’ll torture me – they’ll turn me over to the men who do these things for them. I’m all right – I mean, I can stand to die, but I don’t want any more pain. I don’t want them to—’

‘Aline, you’re the daughter of an otherwise unremarkable nobleman who just happened to irritate the Duke by marrying the wrong woman. They’re a lot more likely to kill you and torture me,’ I said softly.

‘I don’t care.’ she said stubbornly. ‘I don’t want them to win. If I’m going to die, I want to do it on my terms. I can’t run any more.’

I thought about that for a moment. How do you answer when they take the last good thing from your life? It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself all these years, since they killed the King – before that even, in truth: since they killed my wife, my brave Aline. Gods, how in the world had I reached this hopeless place, trying vainly to keep a doomed little girl alive for no better reason than that she shared the same name as my dead wife?

I reached into the inner pocket of my coat and pulled out the tiny package. I handed it to her.

‘I don’t want any more of the hard candy right now,’ she said.

‘That’s not what it is. Open it.’

She did. Inside she saw the little square of soft orange and red striped confectionary. ‘What’s this?’

‘It’s the soft candy,’ I said.

‘You said that before. What’s it for?’

‘It’s for when you can’t run any more. It’s for when there’s no hope left.’

She picked it out of the package carefully with finger and thumb and brought it to her lips.

‘There’s always hope,’ the King said, pushing the tiny package back to me. He’d been away on a trip to one of the great cities, ‘courting the nobles’, as he called them, as if it were all a grand joke he told himself for amusement. He wasn’t smiling now, though. ‘You shouldn’t have asked the apothecary to concoct this without my permission, Falcio, if for no other reason than that it smells absolutely foul.’

‘Would you have given permission?’ I asked.

He pushed me towards one of the great reading chairs in the library – we spent a great deal of time there during those early days. The King had no experience with war; he had never served in his father’s army, nor had he been part of Greggor’s administration, nor taken any part in the running of the country. Most of his adult life had been spent imprisoned, with no companionship but the books his mother had stolen for him. Through that mercy she had made him a strong believer in reading, and as a result, we spent hours in the royal library, searching out and reading books on war, on politics, on strategy.

‘No, Falcio, I would not have given you permission to create a means for my Greatcoats to commit suicide.’

‘If one of us is caught, if we know things—’

‘What things?’ the King asked.

‘Things – secret things. Damn it, you know what I mean!’

‘And you want to kill yourself before anyone can make you reveal those … things?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why not just tell them?’

‘Why not just—? Are you playing with me, your Majesty?’

The King smiled at me. He had a funny-looking smile for a monarch. Despite being better fed and haler than when I’d first met him, he still had that slightly idiotic-looking smile I remembered from the night in his chamber when I’d gone to kill him.

‘Falcio, why in the world would I want to lose one of my Magisters simply to keep a secret that, quite frankly, I’ll never know whether they revealed or not?’

‘So you want us to just tell them everything when we’re captured?’

‘Well, I’m sure you can offer a bit of token resistance – a sort of, “Secrets? What secrets?” type of thing … but really, why not? At least that way I’ll know that the secret’s out. At least that way there’s a chance I keep my Magister, who might later escape and bring back vital intelligence.’

‘Your Majesty, there’s something you’re not getting here—’

‘I’m sure you’ll enlighten me,’ he said drily.

‘If a Greatcoat is near capture, if he’s surrounded, he might be more inclined to surrender if he knows there’s a chance of saving his skin. No matter how brave or loyal the man, it’s a trade he might make.’

‘Whereas you’d prefer they fight to the death?’

‘You said there’s always hope. Well, there’s always hope if you keep fighting.’

The King smiled. ‘No, Falcio, there isn’t. There’s just always someone left to kill.’

‘That’s something, then, isn’t it?’

The King stood and refilled our wine goblets and we sat in silence for a few minutes, idly glancing at the pages of the open books that weighed down the large oak table.

‘You weren’t always a Greatcoat, Falcio,’ he said finally.

‘I wasn’t always in the Greatcoats, but I was always a Greatcoat in my heart,’ I corrected him.

He laughed. ‘Such a romantic! Such an optimist!’

‘It saved you from getting a sword in the belly, didn’t it?’

‘I rather think exhaustion combined with several crossbow bolts had something to do with that as well.’

‘You think I would’ve murdered you, then?’

He thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘No, not once you’d realised I wasn’t my father and I was still helpless as an underfed kitten. But if I’d been a little better fed, a little stronger …’

‘You think so little of me? You think I’d kill someone just because—?’

‘You’d kill someone just because they were bigger than you, Falcio, yes. If they were on the wrong side but they were scrawny, you’d find a way to – well, knock them out or some such thing. But if you’d seen me in that room that night, fit and full of health? Yes, I think you’d have killed me and gone off in search of the next closest heir to the throne until you found someone too weak to defend themselves.’

I didn’t like where this was going, so I picked up the wine goblet and took a drink. It was already empty, so I felt even more the fool.

‘Well then, good thing I found you first, isn’t it?’ I said, putting down the goblet.

The King reached over from his chair and squeezed my shoulder. ‘A very good thing. A miraculous thing. The best of all things,’ he said. ‘The Greatcoats are what’s going to make this country better, Falcio. They’re my dream. They’re my answer. I want them to live.’

‘Your answer to what?’

‘My answer to the fact that a man can be killed for no better reason than it pleases someone above him. My answer to the weakness that fact creates in a country, in a people. My answer to the fact that Avares and the other nations surrounding us will one day decide to come over the mountains – perhaps because they lack food or wealth, perhaps because they want more, perhaps because their clerics tell them that the Gods demand it – perhaps even for no better reason than that they have nothing better to do. Our nation is weakened by a system that breeds a visceral hatred so deep that most people would as soon see the world burn as stay as it is, but lack the will to try and change it.’

‘And that’s your job, is it, being the one at the top of the whole machine?’

‘Mine, yes, and yours. And Kest’s and Brasti’s and all the others, too. First we bring justice, then we bring change.’

‘Justice is a change,’ I said.

‘No, justice is just the start. It’s the thing that will make change possible.’

I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, ‘You forgot women.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A woman can be killed for no better reason than it pleases someone above her, too.’

King Paelis sighed. ‘It always comes back to that, doesn’t it, Falcio? They murdered your wife, and each and every thing you do from that day forth will be because of that, won’t it?’

‘Is that so wrong a reason? To fight – to die, if need be?’

‘If it’s your reason then it can’t be so very wrong – it’s as good a reason for dying as any. It’s just not a very good reason for living.’

I didn’t want to answer. I loved the King, but sometimes he asked more than I was prepared to give. ‘It’ll have to do for now,’ I said finally. ‘And if you trust me in anything, trust me that one day a Greatcoat will be in a position where there is no better option than a quick death.’

The King pushed the tiny package back towards me. ‘Fine. You are my First Cantor and, if you really want a way for Magisters to kill themselves, I’ll talk to the Royal Apothecary myself.’

I relaxed a bit. ‘Maybe you can ask him to make it smell better, too. Perhaps a strawberry flavour?’

King Paelis slammed his fist on the table, and despite his small stature books went flying. ‘Don’t!’ he cried.

I was about to say, ‘Don’t what?’ but the fury on his face told me better.

He knew it, too. ‘Leave it be now, Falcio. You’ve said your piece and you’re getting your way – but don’t ever think you have persuaded me. Don’t ever think this was your reason winning out over my weakness. You’ve won.’ He coughed and wiped at his mouth. ‘Now leave it be. It’s been a long trip and I need a rest.’

A few weeks later a guard arrived bearing a wooden box. On top of the box was a note that said, Try not to get them mixed up. Inside the box were a hundred and forty-four small packages, each containing a square. I opened one, careful not to touch it with my bare skin. It smelled like strawberries, and I couldn’t imagine what that meant.