The Tower of Living and Dying. Anna Smith Spark

Lan thought, judging her with a new way of judging that Landra Relast had not known. Her hands were strong, used to work. Her face was meek. She looked a little afraid of Ru. Maybe she knew what Ru was.

      ‘There’s soap and candles in the cupboard by your bed,’ Lan told Ru. She did not say that she had traded the silver ring she had worn for them. To Kova she said, ‘There’s bread in the pantry, flour and butter in the crocks. I milked the goats this morning. They don’t give much. There’s a nice bank of winter mint on the path down to Pelen Brook, near the big ash tree. Ru likes it in the stew.’ She took Kova out to the vegetable garden behind the house, all bare now apart from black kale ragged like leather. ‘She tries to do more than she should,’ Lan said to Kova. ‘Thinks she’s stronger than she is. Care for her and she’ll be kind.’ Kova looked at her with strong green eyes and strong hands used to work and a meek face. ‘I’ve a sister who’s marrying a fisherman, mistress,’ Kova said.

      Some, some in this world must be kind.

      So that was that. Lan set off slowly down the path into the village.

      There were rumours flying in the village of things happening in the lords’ halls, ships and soldiers summoned to Malth Elelane, mutterings of war. Lan walked with slow steps along the coast road. Walking the road again alone was the worst thing. Without her name and her wealth she was nothing. How strange it was. This was how Marith had been, she thought dully as she walked. Nameless and powerless. She remembered Thalia on the moorland stumbling in the cold, the way Marith’s eyes had been when he looked at her. Little wonder he felt so angry now. But this was also what he had wanted, she thought. To be nothing. To be the thing that was hurt, not the thing that did the hurting. ‘I was happy,’ he’d said. ‘I didn’t ask to come back. To be king.’ Briefly, she thought, briefly he had escaped.

      She walked on all day. She tried not to think of Ru in the damp dirty house that was warm. She stopped in the evening in a way house, huddled in the corner furthest from the doorway, frightened someone might come. Cold greasy trimmings of meat, bread, water: she placed some of each carefully before the godstone at the entrance, saw its gratitude in its blank faceless eyeless face. Before she tried to sleep she got out her pack and looked at the things she had. A horse-bone spindle. A scrap of yellow cloth. A broken twig that was bound to her skin. A gold ring stamped with a bird flying, her father’s crest.

      ‘Eltheia,’ she prayed as she curled up on the stone ledge to sleep, ‘Eltheia, fairest one, keep safe, keep safe.’ She slept with the bone spindle in her hand, dry and smooth and chipped at the edge, old yellow bone riddled with tiny holes where it was chipped, carved from the shoulder bone of an old broken-down farm horse that she heard galloping in her dream. The things that walked the lich roads walked past her, and let her be.

      ‘I am not going looking for revenge,’ she said aloud when she woke to frost crisp white-silver on the dark ground. ‘I am going to make him nothing. As he wanted to be.’ A bird flew up cawing from the trees behind the way house. ‘Not revenge.’

      The things that walked the lich roads walked past her. Laughed.

       Chapter Eleven

      A body was lying on the beach in the sand, face up to the rain. It was lying in the tideline, the ebb and flow of the waves making its head roll back and forth. Its skin was very white.

      Thalia watched it for a while. It shook its head and shook its head and there should be something meaningful in it. Just a dead thing, she thought. Just a dead thing bloated up and eaten by the water. Swollen and salt-filled. There was a jagged hole in its chest, where it had been dead before it drowned. The sea had taken its blood.

      ‘Here’s another!’ a voice called across the beach. Two soldiers came down near her, took the body by the arms, dragging it away up to the pyres that burned on the shore where the sand was dry. Driftwood and reeds and dead flesh. The salt crackled, burned up a brilliant yellow; they fed the fire with pitch to keep the flames high even with the wet bodies in the rain. Thalia watched them drag the body up, its feet making ruts in the sand.

      Osen Fiolt came down the beach towards her. He stopped, nodded his head to her.

      ‘The raiding party has come back,’ he said.

      ‘And?’

      ‘They’ve got some bread. Dried fish. Beer. We won’t die hungry, at least.’

      ‘We will not die,’ Thalia said. We will not. We will not. I will not.

      Osen’s face flickered, looking across the beach where the men worked at the pyres, feeding the flames with pitch-soaked wood. The bones of the ships, consuming themselves. ‘We can’t sail, in this wind, and Tiothlyn can’t sail either, and that’s the only luck we have. But he’ll come. And we’ll all be dead.’

      ‘We defeated’ — she did not quite know how to say it, ‘his father’, ‘his brother’, what do I know, she thought again, what do I know of fathers and brothers, these foreign words, even in my own tongue I have never spoken them, meaningless words, and yet to say them, it hurts me, to say what it is he did — ‘we defeated King Illyn. We can defeat Tiothlyn.’

      ‘Whatever happened at Malth Salene …’ Osen shook his head. ‘I wasn’t there, of course. So perhaps you could ask him to do whatever he did again? I’m surprised Ti hasn’t come already, in all honesty. King Illyn would have marched the men overnight immediately we turned tail on him, followed the ships along the coast. We’re less than a day’s march from Morr Town.’ He gestured at the smoke from the pyres. ‘It’s not exactly like he can’t know where we are.’

      ‘So we will destroy him.’ Thalia thought: I saw what Marith did, at Malth Salene. I saw every man who opposed him die. I know what he is. What is in him. I will not die here. I will not.

      ‘Destroy Tiothlyn? He’ll cut the men’s throats like dogs, Thalia. Those that haven’t already fled. But no – that will be why he’s waiting. Why kill us himself when our men can do it for him?’

      The men were slumped in ragged shelters frozen in the wind, breathing in the smoke of dead flesh. But they would fight. She knew, looking at their faces, she who had seen Malth Salene fall. They would fight for him. Or she would make them fight, if she must. But perhaps they would die, even so. More broken bones on the shoreline, buried in the sand like the wreck of the ships. She looked across at the litter of shelters, like plague sores on the grass beyond the sedge. No one, she thought then, no one thinks that they will die. I do not suppose that his father thought that he would die. His father, his brother – they must have thought, also, that they would win. Remembered the eyes of the sacrifices bound to her altar, staring up at her, she stood before them with the knife in her hands, the High Priestess of Great Tanis, and still, in their eyes, the certainty there somehow that they would not die, that her knife would not truly kill them, even as she killed them.

      But I will not die here, she thought. I will not.

      ‘Why are you still here, then, Lord Fiolt?’ Thalia asked. ‘Why have you not already fled? Or killed him?’ Some little of the dignity game in the Temple, drawing her old status as the God’s hand and the God’s knife. If this is ended, if I am broken and dying here, I can at least have that.

      ‘Because …’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I could ask that same question of you, High Priestess Thalia.’

      You could. They looked at one another. Each pitying the other, perhaps, Thalia thought. For being caught in this. Not able to leave. Drawn to what was offered. Kingship! Victory! Glory! The promise in Marith’s face.

      Osen looked away from her. Looked again at the bodies burning in sparks of salt and pitch. Breathed in deep, and Thalia could see his nostrils flare, breathing in the smell of the smoke. Put his hand on the hilt of his sword. Caressing it.

      ‘Anyway. Here we are. The raiding party has come back,’ said Osen again. ‘There’s food, at least,