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‘It was dark, wunn it?’ the small man pleaded. ‘How’d I know it was Ravn’s own ship?’

  Katla stared disbelievingly from one member of the group to another. ‘You tried to steal Sur’s Raven from under the King’s nose?’

  Dogo shrugged. ‘They all look the same to me, and Knobber wasn’t much help.’

  The tall man laughed. ‘Got the anchor up and a few of them strong Farem lads on the oars; but with Dogo on one side and me on the other with only the one hand, all we managed was to bang into some other great hulk and go around in a circle!’

  ‘Lucky the King’s preoccupied, shall we say?’ Mam declared dourly. ‘Thought it a fine joke, they say; but Stormway’s no fool. Told the guard to keep an eye on us, and that on no account were we to enter the castle or be allowed near the ship. Still,’ she brightened. ‘Plenty of entertainment to be had away from the rich folks. Why don’t you and your brother come spend Moonday night with us so’s we can show you the sights, eh?’ She grinned evilly.

  Katla saw Halli’s dark eyes gleaming with momentary panic. ‘Relatives to visit,’ she supplied smoothly. She rolled her eyes at the tedium of such a duty. ‘Greetings to bear to our mother’s sister and a dull night hearing of her aching hands and swollen knees, no doubt.’

  Mam grimaced. ‘Life’s easier as a sell-sword. These lads here are my family. I pay their wages and they watch my back. There’s more trust and honour between us than from any family I’ve ever known.’

  After that, the talk turned to old campaigns and jobs undertaken, and Katla was surprised to find herself a little shocked that Mam, Dogo and Joz had all fought at the Battle for Hedera Port, in which her own father had nearly lost his life, but on the enemy side.

  ‘Why fight for nothing?’ Joz said. ‘Especially with the Istrians offering good money.’

  ‘Do you feel no loyalty to your own country?’ Katla pressed, feeling a little naive even as she did so.

  Mam laughed. ‘All I ever got from Eyra was the pox and the need to forge my own weaponry at a tender age.’ She clicked her sharpened teeth together in an alarming fashion. ‘I’ve no love for any king, be he the Old Grey Fox or the silly young raven. They all think they can charm or coerce you into doing their bidding, even when it’s clearly against your own interests. The Istrians are oily bastards, but at least they’re realistic enough to know a job worth doing’s a job worth paying for. I’ll take Istrian coin over Eyran promises any day.’

  Put like that, Katla thought, with no family to defend and nowhere to call your home, the mercenary woman’s argument seemed hard to gainsay.

  ‘Sides,’ said Joz, ‘the coin the Istrians pays us comes back to folks like you as the price of our swords.’ He patted the Dragon of Wen.

  ‘Aye,’ said Halli in an undertone. ‘And often enough the blood on the blade, too.’

  Four

  Curse

  Saro was already awake when the sun came up the next day. He had been awake for hours. In fact, he was fairly sure he had not slept at all, for thoughts of what awaited him seemed to have spun endlessly around his head, leaving him dizzy with dread. He dressed as if in a trance, registering for a brief, irritated moment, the absence of his belt-knife from the chair beside his bed – he must have left it in the kitchen, though he did not remember doing so – and dragged on his boots.

  Downstairs, Tanto lay in his bed like a grub in its cocoon. His eyes gleamed. He, too, had been awake for some time, anticipating the exquisite nature of the revenge he would exact from his beloved brother. Everything that had happened was Saro’s fault: if he had not taken the winnings from the race to the little nomad whore, Tanto would have been a lord in his own right by now; a lord with his own castle and a beautiful, devoted wife. He would be whole and admired, looked up to by all those fools who thought themselves better than him – Fortran Dystra and Ordono Qaran, for example – with their money and their lands and their fine, uncomplicated, privileged futures stretching out before them as smooth and shining and endless as the surface of Lake Jetra. He hated them all. But he hated Saro more than any of them. He summoned a great effort and shifted slightly in the bed until he felt his bowels spasm.

  The smell was suffocating. Saro stood over his brother for a few moments, clenching and unclenching his hands, fighting down the nausea that threatened to assail him. Tanto’s eyes were firmly closed, his breathing regular and steady. The ghost of a smile played around the corners of his mouth. He looked as if he slept wreathed in innocence, dreaming of better times; except for the pulse that throbbed insistently in the vein at the side of his temple and the flush of exertion on his cheeks. Saro stood over him suspiciously for a minute or more, waiting to see whether or not he would stir or betray himself in some way. Then, jaw tight, he went down the corridor, heated some water on the stove in the little utility room there, and fetched some washcloths and a lidded tin pot for the waste.

  When he returned to the chamber Favio Vingo was inside standing at the bedside, staring down at the sleeping form of his eldest son. Favio’s chin was dark with stubble and he wore a stained red dressing robe furled about him, tied with a frayed blue sash. His bald head gleamed in the light admitted by the room’s only window. It was rare that he allowed anyone to see him like this, for usually he was most fastidious: shaving close each morning and hiding his lack of hair beneath a winding of cloth. It just showed, Saro thought, how little care he had for anything any more now that the pride of the Vingo clan lay bedridden and seeping like an incontinent dotard.

  When Saro entered, Favio took his hand hastily away from his nose and straightened up. His eyes were damp. Smarting from the stench, Saro wondered uncharitably, or from the grief of it all?

  His eyes travelled over the objects Saro carried, lingering bemusedly for several seconds over the tin pot, then his head came up and he fixed his second son with a scoriating look. ‘I blame you for this,’ he said, his voice clogged with emotion. ‘No matter what you do; no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be a tenth as good as Tanto: do not think you will ever replace him in my heart or in this home.’ And with that he shouldered past Saro, leaving him to his unenviable tasks.

  Saro swayed, caught in the backwash of his father’s contempt. He had thought himself used to such pain; but it seemed that even though such tirades occurred at regular intervals, he had never developed the ability to steel his heart against them. Squaring his shoulders, he set about the task at hand and pulled back the bedclothes, recoiling as the smell hit him anew. Quite suddenly, the invalid sat bolt upright, leering horribly, his gaze bright with malice.

  ‘Nasty, isn’t it?’ Tanto was gleeful. ‘Since you can walk at your leisure to the earth-closet, take a bath or swim in the lake with all the other pretty, naked boys, I thought you should spend as much time as possible elbow-deep in the disgusting state you’ve reduced me to: all that shit and piss and filth. If I could spew on you, I would, just to give you the full picture.’

  Saro reared back, appalled. ‘You know I did not do this to you, Tanto,’ he said in a low voice, proffering the tin pot and ducking away from that glittering black stare. ‘I don’t understand why you are trying to punish me for the misadventure that overcame you.’

  ‘Misadventure!’ Tanto howled with bitter laughter. He pushed the tin pot away so viciously that it slid from Saro’s grip and clattered on the tiles. ‘A mischance, an unfortunate mishap, brought me to this, did it? A little jest on the part of our beloved Lady Falla the Merciful, eh? The Fates crossing their threads in error? I think not, brother—’

  Fingers like claws, he reached out and caught Saro by the arm. Skin to skin, gripped by his brother’s powerful malevolence, the impact on Saro was merciless. He found himself standing paralysed as if on a night shore as wave after wave – midnight-black, boiling with effluents and tentacled monsters, sawtoothed sharks and poisonous serpents – piled up on the horizon, poised to sweep him away, catch him in their undertow and pin him helplessly to the seabed to be pummelled and beset by ho
rrors. Then the first wave engulfed him, and he experienced:

  The sight of a note, written in his own hand, propped against a depleted pile of coin; a blur of movement, then the ransacking of his chamber, details rendered with hallucinatory precision: he saw how an inkpot spilled its contents with infinite exactitude across a neat pile of smallclothes and his favourite doeskin slippers, how the fabrics soaked up the dark liquid, absorbing it with lazy hunger; something silver, protruding from beneath a snowy pillow. A violet-clad arm snaked out, a hand – dark, tanned, muscular: Tanto’s – grabbed up the weapon, the fingers closing around the hilt. A combination of hatred and fury overcame him then, followed by murderous triumph. I will kill him. I will take this dagger and—

  A plunging knife. Feathers. Feathers everywhere.

  Had someone killed a bird? He did not understand. The fingers dug into his arm, unrelenting, bruising.

  The scene changed, became unfamiliar, disorientating. A ridiculous pair of purple shoes with curling toes in Ceran style crunching into black, ashy ground: the Allfair on its volcanic plain, then. Moonshadow and firelight. An altar to the Goddess, kicked over with vicious glee. The skitter of broken terracotta, then the sudden scent of safflower, aromatic and heady.

  And then he was outside a tent lit from within by sconces, could see the outline of two female figures therein, one veiled, the other’s profile clearly delineated: Selen Issian. A hot flush of lust washed over him, followed by a voice echoing in his head, quotations from the Lay of Alesto, candlelight playing on the pattern-welded blade of a dagger . . .

  Then all he could see was blood. Blood everywhere, in the air, floating in tiny globules as if time had slowed almost to death; blood on the blade of the knife, gleaming slickly on his hands. Blood flowing in a great, dark stream out onto a golden shawl . . .

  Something in Saro convulsed then. He staggered back, clutching his head, and Tanto’s grip slipped from his arm. But even with the contact broken, afterimages still chased one another through his skull. He concentrated, trying to make sense of them. The note and the fury it must have engendered he understood well enough: his own note to his brother warning him that he had taken the half-share of the winnings to Guaya, as they had agreed; or as he thought they had agreed, though he should have known never to trust to Tanto having any sense of honour, especially where a blood price to one of the nomad folk was concerned. The feathers, the altar, the scent of safflower; all these images were too random for him to fit into any coherent pattern. His mind kept returning to the knife. He turned it over and over in his imagination, took in its distinctive silver knotwork and elegant pattern-welding. An Eyran blade, he was sure of it. It was surely the one she had given him: Katla, Katla Aransen . . .

  The very memory of her – her competence, her good cheer, her hawklike beauty – gave him the clarity he sought for. Yes, it was the very dagger he had stowed under his pillow, and which had then disappeared. But Tanto had claimed to have been stabbed with it while he tried to defend Lord Issian’s daughter from Eyran raiders, so he must have stolen it from Saro’s chamber; which explained the feathers, the pillow stabbed in fury . . . then the walk – for those shoes were indubitably Tanto’s own, no one else would have such a vulgar taste in footwear – to the tent with the two women inside; which must surely have been Selen Issian’s pavilion, but there had been no sign of Istrian raiders: no disturbance at all until . . .

  His eyes came open, fired by a sudden horrible gush of knowledge.

  ‘By the Goddess, Tanto: what have you done?’

  His brother stared at him curiously.

  ‘By the Goddess, Saro, what are you talking about?’

  ‘It was you! When you touched me I saw—’ He cut the sentence off abruptly, but it was already too late. He watched Tanto’s mien change; but not, as he had expected to one of guilt or remorse, or even fear of discovery: but to an expression of utter calculating avidity.

  ‘I knew it!’ Tanto’s tone was triumphant. ‘You can see my mind! When I touch you, you read my thoughts! You always were so sensitive, so sweet, such a lily-livered, little milksop, always so considerate to the slaves, so gentle with the animals, mollycoddling even the most vicious of the beasts; and they never bit you did they? Oh, no: they bit me: because you knew their minds and you made them bite me!’ His hand shot out again and caught Saro by the wrist. He watched, delighted, as his brother writhed away from him, grimacing as if gripped by some deep inner pain. Hatred flashed in the black holes of his eyes. ‘For years I thought you could not possibly be my true brother – you – such a miserable, timid, spineless child, a brother to me: ridiculous thought! Mother must have lain with a travelling charm-peddler to make you while Father was away at war, and you’ve been left tainted by that forbidden union, shot through with some disgusting magic of the mind . . . So let’s see if my theory bears fruit, shall we? Let’s see if your holier-than-thou, unsullied little soul can read these thoughts, shall we?’ His face contorted with depraved glee. Then he closed his eyes as if summoning his very finest memories.

  A torrent of images began to thrust themselves into Saro’s mind, though he tried all he could to block them, to pull away from his brother’s grip – too strong, too hard for such an invalid, surely?

  A pretty slavegirl, her veiling sabatka ripped in two and tangling around her ankles as she tried to ward off his advances, her hands batting at him ineffectively as pigeon’s wings until he caught her roughly, almost breaking her arm, and bent her double over the table – the table in their dining chamber, the slavegirl poor little Sani, who had died last year of the blood-cough, Saro noted with helpless misery – then kicked her legs apart and pushed his hand into her until she cried out in pain . . . Down in the orange grove, a slaveboy on his knees, crying out incoherently in some guttural hill-language as, thrilled by the boy’s terror and disgust, he gripped him by the hair and forced his head back while with his other hand he freed his cock . . . A pair of brown, long-lashed eyes flashing defiance and despair. A pair of swollen white breasts marbled with pale blue veins that filled his hands to overflowing. A woman’s face, all wet with tears, pleading, pleading in such an appealing fashion that it made him want to hit her yet more. A round, white belly, distended by a six-month child . . . his own . . . his first bastard! The dulled resignation on the bruised face of the whore he came back to again and again, for he paid the brothelkeeper well for his unusual practices . . . The slavegirl expiring at his feet in a crimson sea, Selen Issian staring up at him with that mouth, pink and full-lipped, open in a perfect ‘O’ of surprise. His wife – his wife! Or she would be soon after; for how could Lord Tycho or his father gainsay the marriage once the goods had been spoiled so, whether the marriage-price were paid in full or no? That little shift: so provocative, so flimsy: surely designed to draw him on? He could see the pale moons of her breasts, the aureoles dark as eyes returning his gaze through the sheer fabric. It had been a moment’s work to rip it away from them; and then there was the rest of her, soft and yielding: the breasts exactly as he liked them, ripe and round and just a little heavy, her slim belly ready to do service as the receptacle for his seed; and that place below, untouched by any other man: his to claim, now, now! The first dark, boiling plunge into her was a glorious combination of pain and divine pleasure: he felt the resistance of her maidenhead, slick with his own juices, felt it tear beneath the power and the pressure of his thick erection and admit him, willingly, willingly he was sure . . . Then there followed the thrilling build towards his climax as he ploughed and ploughed this virgin field and her strong fingers gripped his back, her nails digging into his skin with the intensity of her own desire for him; then the gorgeous release . . .

  Tanto’s hands came off his brother just before that next fateful moment. He didn’t want to think about that again, let alone share it with Saro. In any case, he could hardly believe it had happened at all, that she, his beloved, his wife to be—No, surely, it was others, taking his own dagger, plunging it into
him: he had almost convinced himself of that now, could almost form their faces in his mind.

  ‘You monster!’

  Freed from his brother’s touch, Saro had backed himself against the wall, out of reach of grasping hands. His chest heaved. His face was flushed. He felt contaminated by what he had just been witness to: he felt filthy. He had been aware of enough of Tanto’s less-than-praiseworthy characteristics prior to this point: had seen with his own eyes the slyness, the cheating, the lying, the random cruelty to the villa’s cats and dogs, his deliberate roughness with the horses; the way he hit the servants, once to the point of rendering poor little Deno blind in one eye. And he had heard Tanto brag about his escapades with women, but had closed his ears to such claims, dismissing them as at best unlikely and empty boasting and at worst as his brother’s fantasies as to what he would like to do to them, had he the opportunity. To know the full extent of Tanto’s depravity was nauseating.

  In response, Tanto just grinned. He pointed below Saro’s waist.

  ‘Not such a milksop, after all, I see. Perhaps I may call you “brother” after all.’

  Saro stared down and was horrified to find that his body, possessed by Tanto’s wicked thoughts, had betrayed him, for his tunic was tented out by the stiffness of his own erection.

  With a cry of despair, he hurled himself from the room and out into the harsh light of the courtyard.

  Tanto listened with malicious satisfaction as his brother threw up noisily into the marigolds outside the window. That will teach him, he thought. If he thinks he’s so perfect and I’m so unnatural.

  The sound of retching continued unabated. Tanto Vingo threw back the counterpane and swung his great, soft legs over the side of the bed. He put his weight on them gingerly, then levered himself upright. The tiling was cold beneath the soles of his feet. Taking up the washcloths that Saro had discarded, he scraped the worst of the waste he had made off his own skin and onto the sheet and wiped himself down as best he could, grimacing at the smell and the stickiness of it all. Then, sweating and trembling with the effort, he staggered over to the window and peered out. There was Saro on the other side of the courtyard, leaning against the wall. Every line of his body spoke of defeat and despair: his shoulders were slumped, his head hung down, his hands were splayed against the sun-warmed stone as if they were the only things keeping him upright.