Knight's Shadow Read online

  A tightness in my stomach made me aware of how hungry I was and I realised Brasti wasn’t the only one ready for a hearty breakfast. Food, I thought, then figure out how to save the world. I was glad I wouldn’t have to do it while the villagers’ screaming brats ran around wanting to play at being Greatcoats with us, demanding our swords and trying our patience.

  Which was odd. Why didn’t the villagers bring their children? There wasn’t much danger to the village – the Tailor had sent out scouts and none had reported sighting anything more than a few handfuls of Trin’s men – not enough to cause us grief. Come to think of it, where were the rest of Trin’s men? They might have been on missions, but surely they’d have been recalled as soon as anyone knew we were here? And the children . . .

  ‘Swords!’ I shouted.

  Well, ‘shouted’ is a bit optimistic, given my tongue was still thick in my throat and I could barely move my lips. My eyes opened, though, which was good.

  Brasti ran over to me. ‘Whores? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Do you suppose he means that woman from Rijou? The one who saved his life?’

  ‘You might be right,’ Brasti said, awkwardly brushing a hand across my head. ‘Don’t worry, Falcio. We’ll find you another whore just as soon as—’

  ‘Swords, you damned fools,’ I mumbled. ‘Swords!’

  ‘Help him up,’ Brasti said. ‘I think he said “hordes”. Maybe we’re about to be attacked.’

  Kest put his arm around my shoulders and helped me off the bed and onto my unsteady feet. Damn it, I was moving like an old man.

  Brasti picked up my rapiers from the bench and handed them to me. ‘Here. You should probably have your swords ready if we’re going to get into a fight, don’t you think?’

  I would have killed both of them, were it not for the fact that I was fairly sure someone else was about to do it for me.

  Chapter Two

  The Nightmist

  I stumbled out of the cottage, barely able to keep a grip on my swords. The sunlight irritated my eyes and turned the row of mud-brick cottages into a red-brown haze the colour of dried blood.

  ‘What’s going on, Falcio?’ Kest asked.

  ‘The children,’ I said, almost coherently.

  ‘They’re not here, didn’t you hear?’ Brasti said.

  ‘That’s the point – the villagers left their children in the mountain. Why would they do that unless they knew something was coming? We’re about to get hit.’

  I stepped on a small rock and lost my balance, but Kest’s hand on my shoulder kept me from falling over. ‘You should go back inside, Falcio, let Brasti and m—’

  To my left a villager was puttering about in one of the small front gardens. ‘Where’s the Tailor?’ I asked. My mouth was still largely numb from the paralysis and I probably sounded like something between a simpleton and a madman.

  The man looked confused and frightened until Kest translated, ‘He’s asking you where the Tailor is.’

  The villager rose and pointed to another cottage about fifty yards away, his hand trembling just a bit. ‘She’s in there. Been there the last day and night with the girl and a couple of them other Greatcoats.’

  ‘Get your folk,’ I said. ‘Get them out of here.’

  ‘You all should have left by now,’ he said, his voice a mixture of indignation and anxiety that would have struck me as odd had I had the time to consider it. ‘Ain’t good for us to be seen sheltering Greatcoats.’

  ‘Where are your children?’ I asked.

  ‘Safe,’ he said.

  I pushed the man out of the way and started running towards the house. I managed about three steps before I fell flat on my face. Kest and Brasti knelt down to help me, but I screamed, ‘Bloody hells, leave me and get to Aline!’

  They took me literally, dropping me to the ground and pounding along the path to the other house. As I pushed myself back up to my feet I looked around again, expecting to find enemies on all sides, but all I saw were the same villagers I’d seen before, and here and there, some of the Tailor’s Greatcoats. Could there be enemies hiding amongst them? Most of the men were doing no more than tending to their gardens, as they’d done every time they returned from the mountains.

  I hobbled awkwardly after Kest and Brasti and arrived just in time to see the Tailor storm out of the cottage, her steel-grey hair flying in the wind and her craggy features displaying her foul temper. She looked nothing like the mother of a King – I suppose that’s how she’d kept it secret for so long, even after Paelis had died. ‘What in the name of Saint Birgid-who-weeps-rivers are you about, Falcio? We’re trying to make battle plans here.’

  I felt a momentary annoyance that she had chosen to exclude us from her strategy sessions, but set that aside, for now at least. ‘The children,’ I panted, ‘the villagers didn’t bring their children . . .’

  ‘So? Perhaps they got tired of Brasti teaching them to swear.’

  ‘Your scouts,’ I said, pointing to two Greatcoats who stood nearby. ‘You told me they couldn’t find any of Trin’s forces anywhere for fifty miles.’

  The Tailor gave a nasty grin. ‘That little bitch may fancy herself a wolf, but she knows better than to attack us here. We’ve bitten her heels at every encounter. They’ll not try to engage us again unless they want to see more of their men litter the ground.’

  ‘Saints! Don’t you get it? That’s the point: it’s something else. The villagers have betrayed us!’

  The Tailor’s expression soured. ‘Watch yer tongue, boy. I’ve known the people of Phan for more than twenty years. They’re on our side.’

  ‘And in all those years have you ever known them to leave their children behind in the mountains when there wasn’t any danger coming?’

  The anger on the Tailor’s face was replaced by suspicion and she looked around again, then shouted to one of the men tending his garden, ‘You, Cragthen! What are you about?’

  The man was in his middle years, balding, with a fringe of brown hair and a short beard. ‘Just looking after my verden roots,’ he said.

  The Tailor started walking towards him, pulling a knife from her coat. ‘Then what are you burying in the dirt, Cragthen, when we’re so close to the harvest?’

  The man rose to his feet, his eyes flitting between us and other villagers who were beginning to gather round. ‘You weren’t supposed to be here this long – it’s our village, damn you, not yours. We have families to think of. The Duchess Trin—’

  The Tailor reached forward with her left hand and grabbed Cragthen by the shirt. ‘What fool thing have you done, Cragthen? You think you’re scared of Trin? Cross me and I’ll give you something to fear that’s a lot worse than an eighteen-year-old whore who beds her uncle for his armies and fancies herself a Queen.’

  At first Cragthen looked cowed by the Tailor, but then he managed to pull away and shouted, ‘We have children, damn you!’ as he turned and fled towards the far end of the village.

  ‘Stop him!’ the Tailor shouted.

  It took only moments for two of her Greatcoats to catch up with Cragthen. As they hauled him back he said urgently, ‘Let me go!’ His voice was low but full of terror. ‘Please, please, no! If they see me talking to you they’ll kill her!’

  The Tailor bent down to look at what Cragthen had been planting and I joined her. ‘Hells,’ she grunted, looking at the mixture of black earth and a dark yellowish-green powder.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Nightmist – the damned fool is setting nightmist!’

  I looked around at the rest of the villagers, at the other men who had also been busy working their gardens, and saw some were lugging over-full pails from the pump, water spilling over the sides.

  ‘Don’t let them pour that water on the ground!’ I shouted, but as soon as the village men saw the Greatcoats coming towards them they dumped the contents of their pails onto the freshly turned earth.

  ‘Too late,’ the Tailor sighed as the first
drops of water hit the nightmist and grey-black smoke thick as bog water began to fill the air. Even a handful of the mixture – sulphur and yellowflake and Saints-know-whatever-else goes into it – can fill a hundred yards with smoke so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The villagers had put down bucketfuls.

  I turned to the Tailor. ‘Tell me where Aline is – now!’

  ‘She went for a walk to see that giant bloody horse of hers,’ she said, pointing down the path. ‘Don’t just stand there wobbling: go!’

  Kest and Brasti ran ahead of me, and as I followed, we began to hear the heavy thumping of marching men and the raucous clangour of metal on metal.

  Had we guessed what was going on even a few minutes sooner we might have been better prepared, but instead, I had been lying in bed paralysed like a broken old man. Now our enemies were about to launch an attack that could only have one purpose: to kill the daughter of my King.

  *

  The billowing black fog overtook me before I’d gone ten paces down the path. Though the sun still shone above me and the sky remained clear and blue, down here on the ground the world was shadows painted on top of other shadows.

  I pointed my rapiers out in front of me and waved them around like the feelers on an ant, moving in smooth arcs high and low, quiet as I could: I needed to find my enemies before they could find me, and before they found Aline. I longed to call out for her, to hear her voice and know she was alive so that I could make my way to her, but to do so would just make her a target for Trin’s men.

  A dreamlike chaos settled over the village: one moment the nightmist would dissipate enough for me to make out figures in the distance, fighting and dying, the next it closed in on me, suffocating me while it revealed only glints of light reflecting from steel swords clashing in the distance like fireflies flitting in the night air.

  I hate magic.

  ‘Falcio!’ Brasti called out.

  His voice sounded far away but I’d run only a few feet before I saw him fighting two men dressed all in dark cloth with masks covering their faces. For an instant I froze, thinking, Dashini! Trin has sent the Dashini for us. In my mind I envisioned hundreds of the dark assassins, fighting in pairs to kill us one by one. I had barely survived facing two of them in Rijou, so if Trin had managed to—

  ‘A little help?’ Brasti shouted, breaking the spell, and I got to him just as one of his opponents swung a warsword down in a vicious arc that would have taken Brasti’s head off if I hadn’t crossed my rapiers above his head and blocked the blow, my still-unsteady legs feeling the weight of my opponent’s attack. Brasti dived and rolled out of the way – a dangerous move when you’re holding a shortsword – but he kicked out with one foot at the back of the man’s knees and drove him to the ground.

  The other one turned to me and beckoned teasingly with his sword. ‘Come, Trattari,’ he said, his voice thick and resonant in the mist. ‘Amuse me with your Greatcoat tricks before I break you – or better yet, show me to the one who calls himself the Saint of Swords. I’ll happily take that title from him.’

  It wasn’t like a Dashini to bluster in a fight. They say creepy things like, ‘You are tired . . . your eyes wish to close . . . let peace come to you . . .’ – that sort of thing. And a warsword? No, they fought with long, stiletto-like blades, not military weapons. So not Dashini then. Someone else.

  I stepped forward and flicked the point of my rapier in his face, but he didn’t try to parry, instead using his forearm to swipe the blade aside. I heard a clang of metal against metal. Aha. That’s a metal vambrace, I thought. You’re wearing armour under that dark grey cloth.

  ‘Shouldn’t you introduce yourself, Sir Knight?’ I asked.

  He took a swing at me with that great big sword of his. I was still moving too slowly and barely leaned back in time to watch it sail by; when I tried a thrust for his right armpit I missed by a good inch, hitting steel plate instead of flesh: I definitely hadn’t fully shaken off the vestiges of my temporary paralysis. Had Kest been there he would have reminded me, in that way he has, that a good swordsman would adjust for the stiffness.

  The problem with fighting Knights is that they tend to wear a great deal of metal, which means you either have to bludgeon them to death, which is hard to do with a rapier, or find the gaps in their armour and strike there. The dark grey cloth my opponent was wearing made it harder to find those spots, and the nightmist wasn’t helping either. Brasti and his opponent had already disappeared from view.

  ‘Hardly sporting,’ I said, goading the Knight by moving clockwise around him, counting on his plate-mail to make it hard for him to turn gracefully. ‘Aren’t Ducal Knights required to wear their tabards and show their colours in combat?’

  ‘You’d lecture me in honour, Trattari?’ the Knight asked, his tone mocking me, and to add injury to insult, he tried to drive the point of his sword through my belly. I shifted on my heel so it went by me on the left and drove the pommel of my rapier against the flat of his blade, knocking the point down towards the ground. He stepped back before I could take advantage of his lowered guard.

  ‘Well, I don’t like to brag about honour,’ I said, ‘but I shouldn’t have to point out that I’m not the one sneaking in under cover of nightmist to murder a thirteen-year-old girl. In the dark. Like an assassin. Like a coward.’

  I thought that would send him into a rage. I’m usually very good at making Knights want to kill me as quickly as possible. But he just laughed. ‘You see? That’s why you Greatcoats can never become Knights.’

  ‘Because we don’t kill children?’ I flicked my point at him again but he batted it away with his hand.

  ‘Because you think honour comes from actions – as if a horse who stamps his feet three times when you show him three apples is a scholar.’ He began attacking me with quick, vicious swings of his warsword, turning the momentum of each attack into the next as I slid and skipped back and forth to avoid the blows. As I stumbled backwards, I was praying to Saint Werta-who-walks-the-waves that I wouldn’t hit a rock or tree root and fall down. I long ago gave up hope of living to an old age but I still had aspirations of dying with slightly more dignity than a Knight’s warsword removing my head while I was stuck on the ground with my arse in the mud.

  ‘Honour is granted by the Gods and by a man’s Lord,’ the Knight said, continuing his attacks as well as his lecture, ‘not earned from learning some litany of children’s verses. What is sin for you is virtue for me, Trattari.’ His blade came down at an odd angle and I was forced to parry it with both rapiers. The force of his blow nearly knocked them from my hands. ‘Nothing will come from the noblest act of your short life,’ he said. ‘But the Gods’ blessings will come to me when I squeeze the life from that little bitch . . . that . . . bi—’

  He stopped talking then, perhaps because the point of my rapier had found the opening of his mouth beneath his mask. I kept pushing the blade until it found the back of his skull and stopped at the steel of his helm. The Knight sank to his knees, his body twitching: not yet dead, but well on his way.

  Kest sometimes makes fun of me for talking too much during a fight, but unlike some, I’ve had enough practice to keep my focus while I do it.

  I withdrew my blade and took a moment to catch my breath as my opponent fell back to the ground. Only a Tristian Knight would make the argument that to be honourable doesn’t require behaving honourably; that murdering a young girl is justified so long as your lawful Lord demands it. But there you have it. That’s the country of my birth and the place I’d spent most of my life trying to defend from itself. If that meant I had to kill a few Knights along the way, well, I thought, as I took in deep breaths and tried to slow my heart, I could live with that.

  ‘Brasti?’ I called out.

  There was no answer and I feared he might have been struck down. He’d been carrying his sword and that wasn’t his best weapon, even in close combat like this. I needed to get to him and Kest so we could find Aline. I�
��d taken too long with the Knight . . .

  Hells. We never should have stayed in the village. I know they were hoping I would get better rather than worse – so was I, but you don’t need to be a grand military strategist to know that when you’re fighting a force fifty times your size you don’t stay in one place too long.

  As I ran through the mist, filled with ever-growing anger and frustration, I tripped over a body on the ground. As I caught myself, I looked down and through the smoke I saw the still-bleeding corpse of a young girl in a bright blue dress, her arms crossed over her face as if she were still cowering from the blow that had already killed her.

  Chapter Three

  The Dead Girl

  The harsh sound of my own ragged breath filled my ears as I stood over the girl’s body, trying to steel myself for what I was about to see. Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears, please, no, not now . . . Let it not be her. I knelt down and prised the girl’s arms away from her face.

  As I forced the arm aside, I saw the child’s wide eyes, her mouth frozen in a distorted mixture of fear and agony from the blow of the blade that had cut so deeply into her skull, the blood seeping from the wound staining red hair to a deeper crimson.

  Red hair.

  Thank the Saints. This girl had curly red hair, not the straight, mostly brown tresses that Aline had inherited from her father. The rapture of unexpected relief soon turned to a grinding, sickening guilt. This girl whom I had so easily consigned to irrelevance had done nothing – less than nothing – to deserve this end, this way, alone. When the blade had come for her, had she cried out for her mother, or her father?