The High King's Vengeance Read online

  And the power and glory and riches and battle . . . he had dreamed of those things. He had been thinking of them only a few minutes before, hadn’t he? They were comforting thoughts, wonderful dreams of bright futures and the wealth that belonged to the North and would do so again now the time was right . . .

  “Stop that!” he shouted over the tumult of the storm. “Get out of my head, old man!”

  Norrow pointed at him and laughed. “I told you! You all hear it! You all see it! It is coming! Tonight – it is coming!”

  The tavern rocked and shuddered, the air so dense for a moment that Hetch could not hear a thing at all. Then he found himself on the floor, his head ringing, flecks of plaster floating in the air. One of the shutters slammed against the wall, wrenched open by the force of the storm.

  Norrow had gone, but where? What had happened? An earthquake?

  Hetch hauled himself onto his feet and spat plaster dust. The tavern door was wide open and rain gusted in with the wind. Hetch cursed and staggered to the door, leaning on the jamb to steady himself. Norrow was out in the square, his arms upraised in supplication, oblivious to the torrents that soaked his clothes to his skin. Beyond him, Olthea’s temple was shattered into two. The great pillars either side of the entrance had tilted, falling into their constituent blocks, and flames gouted from the roof and the doorway. The temple looked to have been both crushed by the feet of a god and hammered by lightning.

  Oh sweet Ceresel, wrap your arms around us tonight . . .

  “Norrow!” Hetch shouted. He could barely hear himself. This is no ordinary storm, to do such things. This is . . . this is like the North rising up in anger, fighting against foreign gods.

  He wasn’t sure where that thought had come from. He was certain it was not his own. Neither was it Norrow’s. And that left Hetch with a question he did not want answered.

  Thunder rolled across the sky, the sound echoing from one side of the world to the other. Hetch saw clouds pouring low over his head, seeming to reach down for the streets and roofs of Escalia. Reaching down for me.

  “It rises! It rises!” Norrow shouted. “Can you feel it, boy? You can!”

  His voice hollowed again, layered as though two different men spoke at the same time, and somehow his words broke through the near-constant thunder. He no longer sounded entirely human.

  Men moved around him, jostled past him furiously, fleeing into the square and away into the night. Away from the wrecked, burning temple, away from the other fires that rose from the rooftops of Escalia. Hetch ignored the buffeting crowds, ignored them all, transfixed by the lone figure in the centre of the square. The supplicant. Norrow.

  “The North! The great North!” Norrow cried out in that unearthly double-toned voice.

  Hetch knew, instinctively, that he should move. Run. Join the stream of people fleeing the town. But some force held him rooted to the spot, his limbs leaden despite the fear that coursed through his veins. The noise – the terrible noise pressed at his temples, beating like a drum –

  It was not thunder, he realised. His bladder emptied itself.

  Norrow spun to face him. His eyes were no longer his own, his face twisted into a manic, desperate laugh. “The North Will Rise Again!” he proclaimed with the force of a god.

  Drums. War drums.

  Hetch wept, his tears lost immediately in the rain.

  The High King of the North marched once more.

  1

  The cell reminded Cassia of her room beneath the stairs of Malessar’s dhar. The pallet was low and uncomfortable, the barred window little more than a slit, so high in the wall that the light never reached down to her. The walls were decorated with scratched words and pithy phrases, both in Hellean and Galliarcan scripts. The few possessions that had been thrown into the cell with her were not enough to clutter it or make it any more uncomfortable than it already was. Not her sword, quite naturally, or her staff, but the clothes she had amassed during her time in Galliarca – those she had not burned during her desperate fight at the fortress on the border of Caenthell. A coat, skirts and shirts, and her newly-restored patched cloak. They lay where they had been thrown.

  Given Galliarca’s climate, the cell was dry, and so far she had only been bitten once or twice by insects. Aside from the journey here, she had not been ill-treated .

  The door, however, was locked from the outside.

  I am the Heir to the North.

  If she could, Cassia would have locked it from the inside as well.

  The warlock still lived. Cassia no longer knew if that was a good thing. When she knelt by his head, a sharp pain stabbed through her side, driving the breath from her lungs. Meredith’s kick must have broken something. Malessar stared, unfocused, past her at something only he could see. Spittle dripped from the corner of his mouth to pool on the shattered ground beneath him.

  Gritting her teeth against the pain, she pushed him onto his back and straightened his limbs until he did looked less like a child’s doll that had been abandoned to a maelstrom. The warlock groaned, and blood bubbled from one nostril. He smelled of burned cloth, burned hair, and burned flesh – and the acidic tang of sorcery clung to him, mixed inextricably with the other odours. Cassia took a moment to sniff her own skin, and discovered to her disgust that she was also awash with that unnatural stench.

  She cast about until she found a slab that had broken from the fountain and dragged it over to prop up the warlock’s head, tearing off her shirt and bundling it up to soften the makeshift pillow. Then, exhausted already, she had to rest.

  A dead man, a dying man, and a man of stone. And I cannot help any one of them. I am no hero. I could never have been a hero. If I was, none of this would have happened. The curse wards would still stand, and I would have bargained with the gods to join against Baum. And Meredith would still be real. That’s how these things are supposed to happen. Not like this.

  But the world was not a story. Or, if it was, it was not one she had any control over. That much was crushingly evident. She could not even bring herself to think about the way this tale might end – the storm that she felt gathering, even though it had to be hundreds of miles away to the North.

  There was movement at the far end of the courtyard, from the small door that led into the kitchens. More danger. Despite her exhaustion her hand flew to her belt, but her sword – Pelicos’s sword – was not there. A flash of remembrance told her that it still lay where Meredith had swatted it, out of reach. Malessar’s own weapon lay closer . . .

  She recoiled from that thought. She could not touch that sword again. Once had been more than too much.

  Meredith.

  She pushed forward, to where the stone figure knelt. The greatsword lay on the ground before it. She rose with it swinging up in a two-handed grip, the blade leading her with its own momentum.

  Defend. Own the ground you stand upon.

  The small boy in the doorway shrieked in alarm, his eyes wide and white with terror. He fell backwards, screaming for mercy. Cassia barely managed to divert her swing in time: the blade smacked into the darkened frame of the door with a satisfyingly solid thud, instead of carving the boy in two.

  And with that, her surge of energy was spent. She clung onto the sword’s hilt, aware that the embedded weapon was the only thing that kept her standing. The boy – one of the urchins who had listened to her first stories here, she realised belatedly – scrambled backwards on his bottom until another figure came forward to shield him, shouting at her in desperate Galliarcan.

  Leili. Oh, Ceresel be thanked. She’s safe. Cassia breathed out and closed her eyes, and allowed the torrent of curses to wash over her.

  “It’s Malessar,” she said at last when she managed to wedge two words in through the tirade. “He’s hurt.”

  And that was the greatest understatement in the world, she thought. But it diverted Leili’s anger and concern. The cook, her face already pale, paused only to thrust the urchin back into the alley outside – wh
ere a whole crowd of curious and frightened faces already waited – and slam the door closed before she struggled past Cassia and out into the courtyard of the dhar.

  But if Leili is safe, then . . .

  She squeezed her eyes closed again as Leili began to wail, an awful tone of grief that split Cassia’s heart open. The tears she thought she could not shed welled up and she did not have the strength to wipe them away.

  Narjess. The charred, huddled heap of bones and cloth that had been caught in the storm of sorcery. Until just half an hour ago that had been the carpenter and gardener who had tended the dhar and made it such a peaceful haven from the world. Where Leili fussed and chattered and filled the spaces she worked in with sweet spices and songs, Narjess was silent and watchful, deliberate and religious in his movements. Every touch, word or thought was made to improve, to nurture. A difficult shell to prise open, and so a hard loss to endure.

  He must have been in the room he shared with Leili, next to the kitchen. It opened onto the courtyard, just behind where Baum had stood. Perhaps Narjess, enraged by the damage done to the house and the garden, had attempted to attack the old soldier from behind. Cassia had seen what Baum’s magic had done to Vescar’s men, back in the hills of the North – it was too easy to imagine how he might have barely paused in his attacks on Malessar to pour fire into the body of the poor gardener.

  And another death to add to my guilt. If I had opened my eyes sooner, if I had acted faster, if I had followed my head rather than my heart . . .

  But if was a prayer that would never be answered.

  There is no god of knowledge but man. How hollow those words sounded now.

  I am the Heir to the North. Those, she thought, sounded no better.

  She removed the sword from the doorframe with some difficulty, and let the blade drag behind her as she followed Leili into the garden. The cook bent over Narjess, the words of a prayer spat out between her sobs.

  “I didn’t see him,” Cassia said quietly. “If I had . . .”

  Leili broke off and shook her head. “If you had then you would have died too,” she said. Her voice sounded empty. “Just look at this house. This is not how we should live or die. This is sorcery and the curse of the gods. We are not meant for such things.”

  I lived through it. I should not have, but I did. And I am starting to realise that this might not be down to pure luck. Leili’s words chimed with what the old tales said about sorcery: it was for gods and kings, not mere mortals. And I am no longer a mere mortal.

  It was not a good idea to let that slip to the poor woman, she decided. This was not about her, after all. Not yet, at least, though she could feel how soon that would change. There was a strange pressure building at the base of her skull, and the tips of her fingers felt numb. Every time she thought of what she had unleashed in the North – however unintentionally – she felt something reach out and pull at her.

  Leili fell silent and came to her feet again. Her eyes were dark, her lips a thin line of anger. “Show me who did this.”

  Cassia hesitated. She had not seen it happen. What if Narjess had been caught in the middle of one of Malessar’s attacks instead? Only Malessar himself could say.

  And in the end, did it really matter? Perhaps not.

  She pointed to Baum and stepped aside. Leili stared down at the body of the ancient warrior, as though waiting for him to awake and stand up. If he had, Cassia thought, the distraught cook would have killed him all over again.

  Then Leili stepped over him and walked away without a word. Baum was beneath her, Cassia realised. He could be left for the birds. Her time was for the living.

  It was a simple and honest approach to her anger. Cassia could only admire it as she trailed in the woman’s wake, her own emotions drained.

  On the ship, the renamed Rabbit, which had brought her with Malessar to Galliarca, Cassia had spent one uncomfortable day recovering from the effects of drinking far too much Stromondorian wine. She felt like that again now, her limbs heavy and her balance affected so that she stumbled on the broken ground. The way her senses delayed and betrayed her. Her mind could focus on nothing because of the near-constant beat that knocked at her temples. By the time she caught up with Leili, the other woman had reached the warlock and was trying to rouse him.

  Malessar’s condition had worsened even in the few minutes since she had left his side. His skin looked as brittle and transparent as some of the age-old manuscripts she had seen in Hellea’s library. The scale and speed of that deterioration staggered her, even though she already knew the devastating personal cost of his sorcery upon his body. After his attempt to bolster the curse wards that surrounded Caenthell, Malessar had been bed-ridden for several days. Still recovering from that ordeal, forced to face both Baum and the sudden destruction of the curse he had set, was it possible that Malessar could not return from this state of collapse?

  “Sweet gods preserve us,” Leili said. “He’s nothing but a shell.”

  “Is he dying?”

  The woman sounded exasperated. “What does it look like, girl? Am I a sorcerer too?”

  Cassia bit down on her reply. There had to be something that she could do – or else she would have failed everybody. Baum, Narjess, Meredith and Malessar himself. Cassia the Useless. That would be her name.

  “Should we move him?”

  Leili glanced up at the warlock’s private rooms and Cassia’s gaze followed. So much of the balcony had been blasted away, or now looked unsound, that taking Malessar up there was not an option. The room below, the library she had never entered, lay open with the great doors charred and splintered, but the air inside hung heavy with smoke.

  “Go and fetch Jiome’s boys,” Leili ordered. “Tell them to bring blankets. Plenty of them. Your room is untouched, girl. We’ll lay him there.”

  Blankets: they would do for a funeral shroud as well. For Narjess, or for Malessar? Cassia hesitated until Leili reached over to shove her so hard she almost fell. “All the prophets won’t help him if you don’t go!”

  She thought she had seen Jiome for an instant over Leili’s shoulder, part of the crowd that had gathered outside the house. A veteran of Galliarca’s armed sailing companies, now retired – with a pension from the Court – to exercise his own form of tyranny at the head of his family. A man who drove hard bargains, but who always honoured his side. If Leili could ask freely for his help, then Jiome was already in her debt.

  Cassia scrambled back over the wreckage of the garden, choosing this time to go through the dhar’s main entrance hall. The beautiful tiles that covered the floor were broken, the mosaic ruined. Shards of the doors lay everywhere, making her footing treacherous and difficult. She stumbled and caught the palm of her hand on one of the shards. She was still carrying Meredith’s sword, she realised: it was too heavy for her, and she should leave it behind, but for some reason she could not relax her grip on the hilt.

  Nobody in the alley had dared venture past the threshold of the dhar. Their fear of the magic expended within was all too evident. But the boy Cassia had frightened so badly only a few minutes ago was loudly shrieking his way through a garbled version of what he had seen, and when he saw her duck beneath the smashed panels of the door, his face paled and his voice ratcheted even higher. He pointed a trembling finger at her.

  “Northern devil! Northern devil!”

  Cassia flinched and drew the sword up before her as a hundred hostile eyes turned upon her.

  “I’m no devil!” she shouted back. She must look like one though, she realised, covered from head to foot in scratches and blood, her clothes torn – and brandishing a terrible greatsword in both hands. “I need Jiome – Leili needs Jiome. And blankets too. Lots of them.”

  There was a brief pause before the deluge of questions landed upon her. What had happened? Was it a dragon? Horde witchery? Had the gods called up the end of the world? Was it a new Age of Talons? Someone had died! No – someone had been killed! The city was on fire! Th
e Prince was coming!

  “No,” Cassia protested, but her voice was too weak to carry through the crowd. “I need blankets. That’s all.”

  “The Prince!” The cry came from one end of the alley, swiftly taken up by other throats. The crowd pressed against her and then past her. She staggered back against the frame of the door, wincing as a splinter jabbed through her shirt and into her shoulder.

  Cassia pushed herself back into the alley and watched the crowd disperse almost magically through doors into the surrounding houses and into other, even smaller alleyways. There was another crowd approaching from the opposite direction, armed and sporting the dark green cloaks that belonged to Galliarca’s Watch. They came at a run, carrying the short swords and small bows peculiar to this land. There were at least a dozen of them.

  And now she stood alone, holding a greatsword, outside Malessar’s dhar, painted with debris like the sole survivor of a great battle. And I am that, for now. Oh gods – their swords are drawn . . .

  I am the Heir to the North.

  She took a step backwards, and the blade of the sword lifted as she brought it, quite unconsciously, into a defensive position. The first rank of soldiers shouted something at her, but she was not fluent enough in Galliarcan to translate it before they were upon her.

  Steel rang out and Cassia fell back, unbalanced by the weight of the attack. “Stop!” she cried.

  A second man came up alongside the first, hunting for her unprotected flank. If she’d held a staff Cassia was certain she could have held him off as well, but Meredith’s sword was unfamiliar. She could only take them on one at a time.

  “Stop!” she cried out again, struggling to switch to the Galliarcan tongue. “Stop! Please! I am not – not the – ”

  One man lowered his shoulder and drove her into the wall, clearly intending to pin her there. Now this was a style of fighting she could counter. She let herself drop to the ground, into the dirt against the edges of the wall, and kicked up at the soldier’s groin. He dodged away with a shout, allowing her to roll aside and lift her sword in defence again.