With the coming of dusk she would sit huddled with the others, and the fire they made would mock with every tongue of flame. And she would hear the witch’s laughter, and then her terrible screams which now came to Feren and sank in, stealing her satisfaction, her pleasure at what her brother had done. Instead, that sound of pain haunted her, leaving her feeling belittled and shamed.
The easy camaraderie among the Borderswords was gone. Her brother would sit with bruised eyes that caught the reflection of the fire, and she remembered the cry of anguish that had been torn from him when she had held on to his rigid body. She could not imagine what he had taken from her in that moment, to give him the strength to strike back at the witch. For the scar she now bore. For the murder of an innocent man. She had no courage to match his, and if he would now ride for home, she would ride with him and voice no objection.
She told herself that Rint was as he had once been: the brother who would always be there, protecting her from the world and its cruel
turns
. But the truth was that she doubted her own convictions, and for all of her gestures, her willingness to follow Rint, she felt herself falling behind him. She was a child again, and that was no place to be, with what she carried in her womb. Somewhere, in this vast landscape, the woman that she had been – strong, resolute – now wandered lost. Without that woman, Feren felt bereft and weak beyond measure, even as her brother seemed to be rushing towards an unknown but terrible fate.
She’d had no final parting words for Arathan, and this too shamed her. Few would not scorn the notion of an innocent father. After all, the guilt was in the conception, the act of wilful surrender. But she saw him as innocent. The knowledge and the wilfulness had belonged solely to her, and she suspected that she would have seduced him even without his father’s command.
The sky was deepening its hue, remote in its unchanging laws, its crawling progression that looked down with blind eyes and gave no thought to wounded souls and their hopeless longing for peace. If self-pity was a depthless pool then she skirted its muddy, slippery bank on hands and knees, round and round. Awareness made no difference. Knowledge was useless. She held innocence in her womb and felt like a thief.
Ville spoke. ‘A cairn it shall be, then. You two are not the only ones longing for home.’
She saw her brother nod, but he said nothing, and she felt the silence that followed Ville’s words harden about them all. Submission without a word of thanks made plain the surrender, and that could only sting. Rifts were forming and widening and soon, she knew, they would not be able to cross them. She shook herself, straightening in the saddle. ‘Thank you both,’ she said. ‘We are in a broken place, my brother and me. Even Rint’s vengeance stretches too far behind us, while poor Raskan draws so close we might as well be carrying him on our backs.’
Ville’s eyes were wide when she glanced at him.
Galak cleared his throat and spat to one side. ‘That’s a taste I am well rid of. My thanks, Feren.’
Abruptly, Rint shuddered, sobbed, and began weeping.
They all reined in. ‘That’s it for today,’ Feren said, her voice harsh. She slipped down from the saddle and went over to help her brother dismount. He had curled in around his torment and it was a struggle to get him down from his horse. Both Ville and Galak arrived to help.
Rint sank to the ground. He kept shaking his head, even as sobs racked him. Feren gestured Ville and Galak away and then held her brother tight. ‘We’re a useless pair,’ she muttered softly to Rint. ‘Let’s blame our parents and be done with it.’
A final sob broke, ended in a ragged laugh.
They stayed clenched together, and he stilled in her arms.
‘I hate him,’ he said with sudden vehemence.
Feren glanced over at Ville and Galak. They stood over their packs, staring, frozen by Rint’s words.
‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Who do you hate, Rint?’
‘Draconus. For what he’s done to us. For this cursed journey!’
‘He is behind us now,’ she said. ‘We are going home, Rint.’
But he shook his head, pulling himself loose from her arms and rising to his feet. ‘It’s not enough, Feren. He will return. He will take his place at Mother Dark’s side. This user of children, this abuser of love. Evil is at its boldest when it walks an unerring path.’
‘He has enemies enough at court—’
‘To the Abyss with the court! I now count myself his enemy, and I will speak against our neutrality to all the Borderswords. The Consort must be driven out, his power shattered. I would see him slain, cut down. I would see his name become a curse among all the Tiste!’
Her brother stood, trembling, his eyes wide but hard as iron as he glared at Feren, and then at Ville and Galak. ‘That witch was his lover,’ he continued, wiping at the tears streaking his cheeks. ‘What does that tell you about Draconus? About the cast of his soul?’ He marched over to where Raskan’s body was bound across the back of the sergeant’s horse. ‘Let’s ask Raskan, shall we? This poor man under the so-called protection of his lord.’ He tore at the leather strings, but the knots resisted him, until he simply tugged the moccasins from the dead man’s feet, and then dragged the corpse free. His foot caught and he fell back with the wrapped form in his arms. They landed heavily. Swearing, Rint pushed the body away and stood, ashen-faced. ‘Ask Raskan what he thinks. About his lord, his master and all the women he has taken into his arms. Ask Raskan about Olar Ethil, the Azathanai witch who murdered him.’
Feren released her breath. Her heart was thumping fast. ‘Rint, our neutrality—’
‘Will be abused! Is already being abused! It is our standing to one side that yields ground to the ambitious. Neutrality? See how easily it acquires the colours of cowardice! I will argue an alliance with Urusander, for all the Borderswords. Sister, tell me that you are with me! You bear visible proof of what that man has done!’
‘Don’t.’
‘Take his coin and surrender your body – that is how Draconus sees it! He respects nothing, Feren. Not your feelings, not the losses in your past, not the wounds you will carry for the rest of your life – none of that matters to him. He sought a grandchild—’
‘No!’ Her cry echoed, and each time her voice came back to her from
the
empty plain it sounded yet more plaintive, more pathetic. ‘Rint, listen to me. I was the one who wanted the child.’
‘Then why did he drive you away from his son once he determined that you were pregnant?’
‘To save Arathan.’
‘From what?’
‘From me, you fool.’
Her reply silenced him and she saw his shock, and then his struggle to understand her. Weakness took her once again and she turned away. ‘I was the one walking an unerring path, unmindful of the people I hurt, Rint.’
‘Draconus invited you into his world, Feren. He did not care that you were vulnerable.’
‘When he cut me from Arathan, he saved both of us. I know you can’t see it that way. Or you won’t. You want to hurt Draconus, just as you hurt Olar Ethil. It’s just the same, and it’s all down to your need to strike out, to make someone else feel the pain you’re feeling. My wars are over with, Rint.’
‘Mine are not!’
She nodded. ‘I see that.’
‘I expected you to stand with me, Feren.’
She turned on him. ‘Why? Are you so certain that you’re doing all this for me? I’m not. I don’t want it! I just want my brother back!’
Rint seemed to crumple before her eyes, and once more he sank down to the ground, covering his face with his hands.
‘Abyss take us,’ Ville said. ‘Stop this. Both of you. Rint, we will hear your arguments and we will vote on them. Feren, you are with child. No one would expect you to unsheathe your sword. Not now.’
She shook her head. Poor Ville didn’t understand, but she could not blame him for that.
‘We have far to go,’ Galak added in a soft tone. ‘And on the morrow, we shall reach the hills, and find a place for Raskan’s body. A place of gentle regard to embrace his bones. When we return to our homelands I will ride on to House Dracons and inform Captain Ivis of the location. For now, my friends, let us make camp.’
Feren looked out on the plain to the south. There was a path there, distant now and fading, that trekked westward into strange lands. There were patches of ground with soft grasses that had known the pressure of a man and a woman drawn together by unquenchable needs. The same sky that was above her now looked down on those remnants, those faint and vanishing impressions, and the wind that slid across her face, plucking at the tears on her cheeks, whipped and swirled but flowed ever southward, and sometime in the night would brush those grasses.
Life could reach far, into the past where it grasped hold of things and dragged them howling into the present. And distance could breed resentment, when all the promises of the future remained for ever beyond reach. And the child shifting in her womb, as the day died, felt like a thing lost in the wilderness, and as its faint cries reached her from no known place she knelt, eyes closed, hands over her ears.
* * *
Rint dared not look again at his sister; not to see her as she was, on her knees and broken by the words they had flung between them. He left Ville and Galak to make ready the camp, and sat staring into the northeast, trapped in his own desolation.
It was a struggle to envisage the face of his wife. When he imagined her sitting wrapped in furs with a newborn child against her breast, he saw a stranger. Two strangers. His hands would not cease trembling. They felt hot, as if they still held the fires they had unleashed in that moment of fury, so fierce with brutal vengeance. He did not regret the pain he had delivered upon Olar Ethil; but when he thought of it, he saw himself first, a figure silhouetted by towering flames, and the screams filling the smoke and ashes rising into the air became the voice of the trees, the agony of blackening leaves and snapping branches. He stood then, like a god, face lit in the reflection of his undeniable triumph. A witness to the destruction, even when that destruction was his own. Such a man knew no love, not for a wife, not for a child. Such a man knew nothing but violence and so made of himself a stranger to everyone.
Insects spun through the dusk. Behind him he heard Ville muttering something to Galak, and the smoke from the cookfire drifted past him, like serpents escaping another realm, fleeing off into the gathering darkness. He looked across to where he had left Raskan’s cloth-wrapped body. The hands were stretched out, bruised and swollen, and where the leather strings were tied round the wrists they now bit deep. Beyond them were the moccasins, lying on the grass. Draconus was free with his gifts indeed.
Urusander would find a way. He would crush the madness and force peace upon Kurald Galain. But blood would flow and the struggle would be arduous. If only the guilty died, then such deaths could be deemed just, and so make of each unfortunate murder an act of execution. Justice was at the heart of retribution, after all.
For too long had the highborn lounged, smug and complacent with the privileges that came with the wielding of power. But nothing of worth was given for free. Privilege was a bright weed growing on the spilled blood of the enslaved, and Rint saw nothing precious in such bitter flowers. When he looked ahead, he could think of nothing but smoke and flames, the only answers he had left.
It was Draconus’s noble blood that had yoked them all, dragging them through misery and unfeeling abuse. Without his title, he was no different from any of them. And yet they had bowed before him. They had knelt in deference, and by each and every such act they but served to confirm the Lord’s own sense of superiority. These were the rituals of inequity, and everyone knew their role.
He thought back to Tutor Sagander’s nonsense – the appalling lessons the old man had thrust upon Arathan on the first days out. The self-righteous could argue unto their last breath, so certain were they of their stance, and yet with outrage would they view any accusation of being self-serving. But smugness filled the silence after every pronouncement they made, as if condescension were virtue’s reward.
The Borderswords were men and women who had rejected the stilted rigidity of Kharkanas and sought out a rawer truth in the wild lands upon the very edge of civilization. They claimed to live under older laws, the kind that bound all forms of life, but Rint wondered now if the very sentiment had been forged on an anvil of lies. Innocence withered before knowing eyes just as it had once withered behind them. The first foot set upon virgin ground despoiled; the first touch stained; the first embrace broke the bones of the wild.
Outside House Dracons, it had been Ville – or was it Galak – who had bemoaned the slaughter of the beasts, and yet dreamed of taking the last creature by spear or arrow, if only to bring an end to its loneliness. That was a sentiment breathless in its stupidity and tragedy. It arrived as punctuation, and only idiotic silence could follow. And yet Rint knew the truth of it, and felt its heavy reverberation, like a curse to haunt his kind down the ages.
He would fight for justice. And, if need be, he would expose to the Borderswords the sordid delusion of their so-called neutrality. Life was a war against a thousand enemies, from the sustenance carved from nature to the insanity of a people’s will to do wrong in the name of right. His hands trembled, he now knew, from the blood they had spilled, and their eagerness to spill yet more.