Knife Sworn (26 page)

“Your Majesty, may I express my sympathy for the loss of your father-in-law. He was a great warrior. When he was hit with one of our arrows he was ahorse, urging on his fellows. I saw him fight and I was impressed with his bravery.”

Sarmin imagined the scene. His visions of The Megra allowed him to conjure the scents and colours of the Fryth mountains, the feel of the sun and the rain, the voices of the soldiers, the fear of death and the grief of loss. Only the sensation of riding a horse eluded him. “Thank you,” he said, wondering whether Kavic was moved to speak by affection for his own father-in-law. Did he have a wife? A child? Was he afraid for them—did he keep secrets from them? He could not ask, with Azeem hovering behind.

When Sarmin said nothing more, Marke Kavic continued, eyes focused in concentration as if he had memorized the words, practised them. “Your Majesty, since our negotiations begin in the morning, I thought we might speak outside the hearing of our advisors.” The marke himself had only one, the Mogyrk austere. That he had come here without the priest meant something—perhaps more than Sarmin realized. Sarmin watched the man with interest, delighting in his strange accent and exaggerated politeness. “Advisors have agendas of their own, Majesty. My grandfather is the duke, not I, but I am familiar with the back and forth that comes with rule.” He paused before finishing with blunt words. “I want you to know that I am committed to the peace.”

Sarmin smiled. “As am I.” He saw the other man’s relief in the relaxed set of his shoulders. He wished he could ask him things, about Fryth, and about his life there. He wondered if Kavic had brothers, if he rode horses, if he knew how to climb a tree. Once Beyon had come to this room and Sarmin had thought of him like a new book that he could not keep. He felt the same of Kavic.

“Do you know the story of how we became a colony of Yrkmir… Your Majesty?”

Sarmin had read all he could about Fryth, once he realised he was at war. “Fifty years ago your grandfather, the Iron Duke, held the Yrkmen off for over one year.”

“He did,” said Kavic, with a sad smile, “and that is how he earned his name. Iron for his will, and duke where he once had been king. Our city is against the mountains, and a river rushes through it. My grandfather had everything he needed and would not come out from behind his great wall. It came down to fighting, and numbers. They had five times our men with more coming every day. Once they had my grandfather on his knees they made his people take down their wall, stone by stone. In its place they built one of wood, thin and useless. One that reminds my grandfather, every day, that we depend upon Yrkmir to protect us.”

But it had not protected Fryth from Arigu. Had the Yrkmen, too, been held up by snows, or had their First Austere decided to let the colony fall? Kavic had told him that story for a reason.

The marke said no more about Yrkmir, instead nodding towards Helmar’s writings, scattered across the desk. “Old papers,” he said, “Majesty.”

“Parchments—yes. I am studying a… different historical matter.”

“That is a Mogyrk symbol, Magnificence,” said Kavic, the honorific rolling from him now with no hesitation. He tilted his head towards a particular fragment and Sarmin looked at the symbol drawn there, a half-moon suspended over a concave triangle. Sarmin had put this and many others aside as a mystery but now excitement built inside of him. “Do you know this kind of magic?” he asked, leaning forwards, watching the marke’s eyes flicker over Helmar’s work. “Do you know what it means?”

—Put it away. Put it away
now.

“It’s my cousin who follows the path of Mogyrk, Majesty,” Kavic said, “While my own meagre familiarity comes from attending rituals and feast days. These symbols of devotion are important at certain times of the year.”

“Devotion?” Sarmin remembered how the pattern had wrapped itself around his brother Beyon and stolen him, shape by shape, and yet this was Kavic’s religion. He must be more cautious; Austere Adam could be using Mogyrk’s signs to exploit the hole in Beyon’s tomb, hollowing out the great city of Nooria, even as the emperor sat and spoke with the marke.

Kavic waved a hand, as if pushing aside Sarmin’s concerns. “I have heard that only one pattern came here, Your Majesty. That is the same as one grain of sand finding its way to Fryth, for there are many patterns, and few of them do harm. Mogyrk Named everything and these are the Names.” Kavic motioned towards the symbol Sarmin still held in one hand. “With those Names we can call upon the essence of things to aid us.”

To replace that which was lost. To rebuild. If Mogyrk’s own death had made this wound then His own magic could heal it. If Sarmin could learn all of Helmar’s pattern-marks, gain mastery over them, he could fix Beyon’s tomb. Fix Migido. Fix himself. “Better than our Tower calling upon fire and stone,,” he breathed leafing through the parchments, excitement in his fingers.

Kavic frowned and backed off. “We do not subjugate anything to our will, Your Majesty, even the elements.”

He will speak to me of subjugation?
Frustration and outrage together guided Sarmin’s tongue. “The Pattern Master enslaved his people, stole their memories—”

“The Pattern Master was Cerani, Majesty!” The marke blinked, as if surprised by his own words. Behind Sarmin Ta-Sann shifted; Azeem cleared his throat. Sarmin let the silence last. The conversation he had begun with such hope was now ruined. No matter how much he liked a man, he would never make a friend. He put down the parchment and waited two breaths before speaking.

“My wife is like you,” he said, “She speaks the truth without thinking. I find it a valuable trait, even if those close to me do not.”

“Thank you, Magnificence. Apologies.” Kavic’s eyes flicked to the vizier and away.

Sarmin imagined Azeem’s sour face.

“No need…”

—the mountains, so cold—never wanted to hurt her, oh please, I just had the knife—there he was, grinning like a rat on feast-day—kill him—please, where am I?—home, see my little girl—kill him!—

Sarmin stood, so suddenly that the desk rocked beneath his fingers. “You should go. We will continue this in the morning.”

—Kill him!

“You should go,” he said again, fingers digging into the wood. The Many nearly had him now.

Kavic made to kneel, but Sarmin waved a hand. “Go. All of you!”

It took too many seconds for all three of them to leave the room and Sarmin came close to pushing them. Once they had gone he bolted the door and made swiftly for the decoration that spoke to him in memories, that had shown him the horrors of the war in Kavic’s land. Gallar’s death, throttled on a rope beneath a tree, still haunted Sarmin’s quiet moments. He’d no desire to share more pain. But perhaps the voice would drown out the Many and keep them from turning his hands to other tasks.

With his fingers above the patterned wall he hesitated. Was the design the same? Had those dark lines made some subtle shift? There was a time when he would have known without a moment’s consideration. The Many howled at him, a shrill chorus of wants and fears. His hand wavered, pulled by divergent needs, few of them his own. “No.” And he set his palm to the wall.

The rain soaked through her shift quick enough, the goatskins underneath thick with mutton grease held out longer, but now she can get no wetter. The rain has reached her bones. There’s precious little over them but papery skin these days. The Megra crouches in her misery.

Behind these memories Sarmin sits wrapped in confusion. The Megra was never patterned, surely? She knew Helmar, knew enough of his tricks to escape? And yet her memories are served before him. And are they even memories or is this now? White Hats in the Fryth valleys, nervous of a Yrkman advance across the borders… all of it fits with the likely chaos of Arigu’s war.

The rain drips from her hair, tears for the boy. He hadn’t known he wasn’t coming back. There’s some bliss in ignorance, but not much. All that effort following her through the high pass only to end his journey fifteen miles from where it began a similar number of years ago in Getrin Hallartson’s round-hut, Getrin standing over his new wife as she struggled to push out a child she’d been too old to have. Gallar they’d called the baby. Megra had been there, exchanging her herb-craft and common sense for two chickens and a sapphire smaller than the nail on her little toe. She’d slapped his pink arse and made him say hello to the world, told his parents some empty nothing concerning the favourable alignment of stars. She hadn’t seen this end though, not seen it clear, but she knew it would be soon enough and not good, worse than the father’s end, and the father’s death was going to be a slow and lonely one.

“I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.” She whispers it to herself, beneath the fall of the rain. Even her voice doesn’t sound her own, the missing tooth changing it, putting a sharp edge on each “s.” Her mouth hurts too, a constant sick-making throb. There haven’t been many hurts this bad in her two hundred years, nor a pit of despair so deep. “I don’t care. I don’t care.” Two hundred years, few of those lived well, most of them spent as a wrinkled crone, and still she isn’t ready to let go. There’s a little bliss in ignorance. Megra would trade in another fifty years to be ignorant of what she is.

“Knowing what you are doesn’t mean you can change what you are.” That had been the first of the curses Helmar gave her, each wrapped like a gift, and she, being young and foolish and in love, had taken them all.

Megra hunches in the wet, touching the pain of her missing tooth with her tongue, quick investigations,wincing returns. She supposes the boy hung with the others. It fits the pattern. Helmar would have known, he would have been able to tell her before the child was born. It seemed he knew everything in those days. He saw the great design clearer then than when he came into his strength and they called him Pattern Master. He had been old when he first came to Hollow, a traveller bound for the pass, but a hundred years hadn’t touched him. The pattern stands outside time, and through it, penetrating days and minutes as completely as centuries.

“A man can’t truly see the pattern without being seen by it, without becoming it, and when a man truly sees what is written under each second, beneath each beat of a heart, then the days slide around him and no longer dare to take their toll.” That was how he put it. That was how he saw it back then. But even Helmar didn’t see all the design, maybe no man ever could, and so time touched him, albeit with the lightest kiss, and with time he changed, soured, saw less and less of what once had filled his vision, until the pattern shrunk to little more than a means to power.

Megra looks up at the two soldiers in the ring of thorns with her, boys both of them, nervous beneath their white helms and the scales of their armour, far from home, maybe a decade or two more than Gallar had to toughen them up. She finds it hard to tell these days. They all look like children, vicious stupid children dressing up in their fathers’ armour, holding their fathers’ swords.

“The day he left me Helmar held my face between his hands and said he would never see a woman more beautiful. He said I was his mountain flower.” She laughs, a harsh sound in her ancient throat. “Told me he loved me and I would never wilt or wither. Told me he would set a gift on me.”

The two men watch her with distaste. One raises the butt of his spear. Megra looks away. The Pattern Master’s gift had soured, keeping her beauty only long enough for it to become a curse, for it to brand her a witch, a thing apart from her kind. She had wilted and withered both. Dying though, that proved to be another matter. But perhaps that too would come soon enough. Her own knowledge of the pattern was ever a crude thing, a knowing more felt than seen, as if discovered through blind fingertips, one corner at a time, but it was clear enough that whatever end had stalked her through the years it was now catching up fast.

When the guards look away the Megra touches the wrap hidden beneath her shift. “Be brave,” the boy had said, had dared to instruct her, barely dry from the womb and… and now dead. She slips the ring out, hidden in her hand within the veil of her hair. Helmar taught her to see past darkness lifetimes ago. That trick she had not forgotten. The gold gleams, ageless and without stain. Helmar told her once that gold, all of it, was made in a single heartbeat in the dying scream of a star. She had watched him pour the metal from crucible to mould, brighter with heat than it would ever be again. They had passed the ring between them before it cooled enough, giggling and gasping, tossing it to the other before the metal burned their hands. She had clung to him, pestered, laughed, as he set the words there, stamping each line with a steel tool.

“What does it say? What does it say?” She wanted to know.

“What you need to know,” he said. “What you need to hear.” Ending his sentence as every other with a quirk of the lips, setting on his words, seemingly so clear, a seal to render them inscrutable, as ambiguous as every part of the man, and past that quarter smile the briefest glimpse of darkness, so fleeting that it might only be imagination.

She snatched it from him then and read, devoured the words. “You are my salvation.”

“What does that mean?” she laughed but the words set a chill in her. “Salvation? That’s silly. I should write that for you.”

He had taken the ring from her, folding it in his palm, too wide for a finger, or even thumb, too narrow for a wrist. He took it and left her with a kiss. “My sweet Meg.”

In the darkness of the forest, in the shadow of her hair, with the cold rain running, and more than two centuries aching in her bones she reads, “You are my salvation.”

A guardsman’s kick shakes the Megra from her thoughts. More rustling, lanterns swinging, shields against the thorns, and the officer who pulled her tooth strides in flanked by several men, all dripping.

“Up. Woman. My captain has come. He will want to question this… expert. General Arigu is keen to meet the Yrkmen so let us hope your tale pleases us.”

Sarmin wants to stay, to watch this woman who once loved Helmar, to understand this war in his name, to know why Gallar died, but the scene is fading. The forest, the rain, all growing faint, reduced to patterns of sound and light. He tries to hold on but it’s fingers catching sand and the moments slip from him.