The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (4 page)

Her aunt meant Maelys, of course, and she could feel the
sisters’ hard little eyes on her. They blamed her for every misfortune and
Maelys didn’t understand why. She worked harder than any of them, never
complained, and always thought of Fyllis before herself. Maelys felt as if she
had to make up for some awful crime, though for the life of her she couldn’t
think of anything she’d done wrong. Even as a little girl she’d been a dutiful,
obedient child.

‘Just be thankful
she
hasn’t got a talent,’ said Aunt Bugi venomously. ‘Imagine the trouble the
little cow would have caused us if she did have one.’

Until the war ended, having any kind of ability for the
Secret Art had been a precious, special gift, but since the God-Emperor came to
power it was more often a death sentence. Maelys squeezed her eyelids tightly
closed, clutched her taphloid to her chest and gave thanks that she had not a
skerrick of talent.

Lyma began to sob again and this time her sisters couldn’t
console her. Maelys wanted to cry as well, but she wasn’t going to give in to
her loss. Someone had to be strong and it always fell to her.

They ate a frugal breakfast of cold mash speckled with
chopped, mouldy nuts. After washing up, Maelys put the last crumbling stick on
the fire and returned to her book, though she couldn’t concentrate.

They had only survived this long because of Fyllis, or
rather her instinctive talent for deceiving Jal-Nish’s wisp-watchers, and the
mealy-mouthed aunts had nothing but praise for her. Their father had been on
the run since Maelys was twelve and she’d only seen him fleetingly over the
next four years, but he’d finally been taken by the Militia three years ago and
was now dying in Mazurhize, three days’ walk away down the steep mountain
paths. Rudigo wasn’t expected to last the week, though, after grieving for him
so long, she mainly felt relief that his torment would soon be over.

Her last two surviving uncles, Haga’s and Bugi’s husbands,
had disappeared when Maelys was thirteen, not long after they’d passed a
loop-listener, and their bodies had never been found.

The farms, estates and vineyards of Nifferlin had been
confiscated when she was fifteen, and two years later the manor had been torn
down, save for this small section which Fyllis had, in some incomprehensible
way,
hidden
even from the
wisp-watchers. But they kept coming back.

Even though it meant death to be found here, Haga and Bugi
had refused to leave their ancestral lands. Lyma had no choice but to stay with
them, for she had nowhere else to go. Maelys and her mother had dug out the
demolished pantries and storerooms but their last storage bins had been scraped
bare in early autumn. The family now survived on what they’d gleaned from under
the nut trees, though the last mouldy barrel would be empty by mid-winter. And
then, unless a miracle happened, they’d starve. Maelys still didn’t know what
Clan Nifferlin had done to offend the God-Emperor.

She smoothed down her threadbare skirt, rubbed a
goose-pimpled arm and turned another page, though she hadn’t taken in the
previous one. She longed to be like the brave heroines in the tales she loved
– those girls and women who could fight any enemy and cheerfully resolve
every crisis. They were clever and resourceful as well as brave.

Unfortunately, Maelys had grown up expecting to marry well,
then manage her home, estate and vineyard. It was all she knew, but that
prospect was long gone. No respectable man would have her now. The family was
tainted.

The muttering died away; her mother and aunts turned to
stare at her again. Maelys, unsettled, ducked her head, watching from the
corner of her eye until they turned back to Fyllis, smiling, stroking her hair
and offering her the last of the honey nut cakes made from a honeycomb Maelys
had found while gleaning in the forest. She salivated but there would be none
for her. Even Maelys’s mother treated her like a servant. What had she done to
make them resent her so? It was as if she were cursed.

Maelys tried not to resent her little sister, but it was
hard sometimes. Fyllis was eight, eleven years younger than Maelys, and they
were as different as two sisters could be. Fyllis wasn’t clever but she was
exceedingly pretty – an ashy blonde, blue-eyed, golden-skinned beauty who
one day would be as tall, slender and elegant as their mother had been. And as
the heroines of my tales always are, Maelys thought ruefully.

She took after their father. Maelys was little and pale,
with hair as black as char, eyes the colour of bitter chocolate and eyebrows so
dark they appeared to have been brushed on with ink. And she was inclined to be
buxom, which was most unheroine-like.

As she turned the next page, her mother and aunts stalked
across and gathered around her like fluttering birds – all beaks, claws
and long, bony shanks. Her mother plucked the book from her hands and cast it
into the fire. Maelys started up with a cry of dismay but the aunts pushed her
back on her stool and held her down until she gave up the struggle.

‘We can’t take any more,’ said beaky Aunt Haga, staring at
her, head to one side. ‘Your time has come, girl.’

‘The men have let us down, as men always do,’ said
fluffy-jowled Aunt Bugi. ‘It’s up to the women now.’

Maelys thought that was a bit rich, since the men of the
clan had died in agony trying to protect them or, in the case of her father,
were soon going to die. She didn’t say anything. The three sisters were immune
to any opinions other than their own, and they’d put her down so consistently
since her father fled that she knew they wouldn’t listen to her now.

‘It’s up to you,’ said Lyma, the youngest of the trio. She
still managed a hint of elegance, though hard times had turned her once slender
figure to stringy sinew and wasted muscle, and she was losing teeth. ‘You’ve
got to save the clan.’

Though Maelys was a dutiful daughter, and she’d been
expecting this for months, a chill ran through her as she confronted the
relentless aunts. They must be planning to marry her off to some disgusting old
lecher, or worse, one of the brutal sub-sub-minions of the God-Emperor. Whoever
it was, there was nothing she could do about it. The aunts had worn out what
little influence they’d maintained a year ago, pleading vainly for her father’s
life. Maelys was their only hope and if she failed her family they wouldn’t
survive.

‘Who is it?’ she quavered, watching the pages of her
precious book curl up and blacken in the fire. Tears formed in her eyes –
at this moment, losing the book felt worse than the other, somehow. ‘Who do I
have to marry? It’s not … Seneschal Vomix, is it?’ She shuddered with disgust.

He’d spoken to them on the road once, on their way to market
when she was eleven. Vomix was a thin, ill-favoured man whose yellow eyes had
seemed to look right through her clothing, and she’d hated it. Maelys had
likened his face to the rear of a boar, but thankfully he hadn’t heard. She’d
since learned that he was responsible for enforcing the God-Emperor’s will in
this province, a task he carried out with unnerving relish.

‘Vomix!’ snorted Aunt Bugi. ‘You’ve got tickets on yourself,
girl! He may be a vicious brute, but he’s a powerful man who can have any girl
in his domain. He wouldn’t look twice at a little dumpling like you.’

After living on such meagre rations for the past year,
Maelys couldn’t be described as plump, but the name hurt.

‘Forget those dreams,’ said Aunt Haga. ‘They’re not for you,
any more than the silly adventure tales you’re always mooning over.’

‘Or scribbling in your sad little diary,’ sneered her
mother. ‘You’re just like your father. He had too much imagination and look
where it got him.’

Maelys stood up abruptly. ‘How dare you read my private
book!’ she cried, breast heaving. ‘And you’ve told
them
?’ She glared up at the bony aunts.

They pushed her down. ‘Of course I’ve read it!’ snapped her
mother. ‘If we’re to survive I have to know everything. We all had a good laugh
before we put it in the fire.’ Maelys choked, but Lyma went on, ‘Though then we
had an idea. We’re sending you on your very own quest.’

The backs of her hands prickled. ‘Me? Where am I going? What
am I supposed to do?’

‘It’s a vital mission, Daughter,’ said her mother. ‘A secret
journey.’

‘It’s a plan so bold and desperate, no one but us could ever
have thought of it,’ cackled Aunt Haga, who held a supreme opinion of the
sisters’ collective intelligence, and especially her own.

Maelys gave her a look that said, What would you know? In
all your life you’ve never done anything but gossip.

Lyma slapped her across the face. ‘Show respect for your
aunt! The lineage of Nifferlin is one of the oldest in the east, girl. We’re
privy to secrets you’ve not imagined in your wildest scribblings, and never
forget it.’

‘Even a dreamer like you must know about the God-Emperor’s
son, Cryl-Nish Hlar,’ said Aunt Bugi. ‘And how his ten years were up two weeks
ago.’

Maelys rubbed her cheek, where she could feel the welts left
by her mother’s hard fingers. Of course she knew about Nish, which was the name
the common people called him. She’d first been told the great and terrible
Tale of Nish and Irisis
when only nine,
and it had moved her more deeply than anything she’d ever heard.

She’d read a brief, banned version of the story many times since,
though not even her all-seeing mother knew that. Maelys pored over it in secret
and hid it carefully in an old pot in the orchard afterwards. If only she’d
left her diary there as well.

‘Nish was one of the heroes of the war,’ she said softly.
‘As well as an architect of the audacious plan that ended it, and all by the
age of twenty-two.’ And he had given up everything for love – no, for
just the memory of his dead love. Maelys’s romantic soul was so touched that
tears sprang into her eyes every time she thought about the story. Nish was
strong. No matter how bad things got, he’d never faltered, and she admired that
kind of courage more than anything, for it reminded her of her father. Nish
would have had his own place in the Histories, had not Jal-Nish abolished and
burned them. ‘What did he do when he got out?’

‘The fool refused his father’s offer, tried to seize the
sorcerous tears and was sent back to rot in Mazurhize for another ten years,’
Lyma said contemptuously. ‘What a waste.’

She didn’t mean a waste of Nish’s life – Lyma didn’t
give a fig for him. It was the opportunity that had been wasted. But Maelys’s
admiration for Nish only grew. He was steadfast beyond all other men; he would
never yield; never bend from the principles he held dear. Myth, rumour and,
recently, prophecy held him to be the Deliverer who would save the world from
the wicked God-Emperor and usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity.

‘Truly, Nish is a saint,’ she murmured, though she was not
so credulous as to think that he could save the world. Jal-Nish was all
powerful and could never be beaten. But if only …

Lyma and her sisters exchanged incredulous glances. ‘He’s a
moron,’ Lyma rasped. ‘A selfish little runt of a man who deserves everything
he’s got.’

The tall aunts often called Maelys a runt, and the insult
made her feel closer to Nish.

‘Can you feed your sister with
principles
?’ sneered Aunt Bugi. ‘Can you clothe her with honour?’

‘Can you shelter and protect your clan with dead icons?’
said Aunt Haga.

‘Yet there’s a chance,’ said Lyma. ‘Assuming that the child
…’

Again the aunts exchanged those ominous glances. Maelys
wasn’t sure if they were referring to her or Fyllis. No, surely not Fyllis.
‘What is it?’ she cried, feeling quite bewildered.

‘It’s a bold, far-reaching plan,’ said Aunt Haga, again
studying her in that head-to-one-side, bird-like way. ‘But quite desperately
dangerous.’

‘It’s treachery, sedition and heresy all rolled into one,’
said Aunt Bugi quietly. ‘Scheming to overthrow the God-Emperor himself. And
should you fail, Maelys, we’ll die in the most excruciating agonies his
torturers have ever invented.’

Maelys’s heart missed a couple of beats, then began to race.
Everyone knew about the rebellions of a few years ago, and the savage brutality
with which they’d been crushed so as to teach the whole world a lesson.

‘Dare we?’ said Aunt Haga. ‘Dare we risk all to gain all?
Indeed, is the girl up to it?’

She definitely meant Maelys this time. No I’m not, Maelys
thought desperately. How could anyone think I could be? I’ve never been
anywhere, never done anything outside the estate, never been trained to use
weapons. I’ll be caught, tortured in the most fiendish ways, tell everything
and then we’ll all die.

‘She’s a dreamer and a
romantic
,’
sniffed Aunt Bugi, peering short-sightedly at Maelys. ‘And yet, if she can be
prevailed upon to use it, she’s got a good head on her shoulders.’ The
backhanded compliment was the first she’d ever given Maelys but it came too
late. Maelys had been undermined so often that she had no confidence in
herself.

‘We’re dead if she can’t!’ said Aunt Haga.

‘What is it?’ Maelys was finding it hard to breathe. ‘What
have I got to do?’

‘Cryl-Nish is the only man who has a chance of overthrowing
his father,’ said Lyma. ‘But first we’ve got to get him out of Mazurhize, to
his supporters.’

‘What supporters?’ said Maelys, but they didn’t answer.

‘And then ensure his gratitude,’ said Aunt Haga with another
assessing glance at Maelys.

‘What do you mean, “we”?’ said Maelys.

All three sisters looked towards the corner, where Fyllis
was moving her carved figures about, singing, a vacant look in her eyes.

‘No!’ whispered Maelys. ‘You can’t even think –’

‘Why was Fyllis blessed with the talent,’ hissed Aunt Bugi,
‘if not to restore Clan Nifferlin to its rightful position?’