Chapter 41
By the time they reached the market, the sun was high in the sky, and the heat had begun to settle upon the city. It was later than Richard would have liked, but Flint had not been in his bed when he awoke, and only strolled in near lunchtime with a satisfied smile.
“Bedded three sailors, handsome. All at once. Lovely lads. Two from a fishing crew and one off a merchant skiff. Spent half the time in all manner of positions, and the other half learning of every vessel in the Eastern Harbour. We have our target, now. I’m going to have fun stealing from him.”
“You bedded three men for the sake of a ship?”
“I bedded three men because I wished to. The ship was a happy result. Come now, don’t look at me so, I’ve done more useful work than you shall do all day.”
The streets shimmered, pale stone reflecting sunlight. Richard clutched the purse in his breast pocket and drew down the hood of his cloak.
“Stop fondling your coin pouch,” Flint said as they passed through an archway. “You may as well be shouting that you have something worth stealing.”
“Advice from a thief?” Richard muttered.
“Aye, and precious as gold, that is. So you’d best listen.”
The market sprawled east of Antlershield Square, and it was a thing of some splendour.
Stalls crammed against one another under striped white-and-blue awnings.
A mix of smells bombarded Richard—fresh fish, roasted pork, salted anchovies.
Vendors bellowed over one another in the rolling Estaran cadence, half-singing their prices.
The customers yelled back just as loud, and the resulting clamour set Richard’s teeth on edge.
A jeweller’s stall caught his eye. Elara would have pounced on it. She’d have snatched that necklace of orange gems and held it to her throat. She’d have batted her lashes—“Brother, see how it brings out my eyes, I simply must have it!”
Richard looked away with a hard swallow.
But the stall after it was selling carved figurines of horses—a destrier rearing, a dappled grey bucking, a foal sleeping.
Corwin kept a shelf of these in his chamber, arranged them by colour, and how he’d delight in that bay mare with a white blaze on her brow—
Forget them.
But again, the next stall was auctioning off illustrated storybooks. And there was ‘The Lady of the Lantern’—Briony’s favourite. Its yellow border painted with intricate detail—
Richard pinched the bridge of his nose and kept walking. No, he would not buy them gifts. The wound they had left ached still, and he suspected the wound he had bestowed on them ached no less. Simply thinking of them draped a great weight over his shoulders.
Flint, thankfully, provided a distraction.
He dragged Richard through the stalls, seeming at ease in such a gaggle.
At a smith’s stall, he suggested a pair of leather wristlets, but it seemed too plain.
He then suggested a silver flask, but Kaelen rarely drank.
Finally, with a waggle of his eyebrows, Flint gestured at a suggestively shaped wooden object from a vendor whose stall lay half-hidden by a curtain.
Richard regarded Flint flatly. “Truly?”
Flint winked. “It comes with a bottle of oil.”
“Perhaps I should buy it for you since it is clearly all that occupies your perverted mind.”
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing.” Flint’s cackle froze, his gaze fixing on some point in the distance. “Got to go, handsome. Just spotted the owner of the ship soon to be ours.”
“Very well.” Richard frowned at the glint in Flint’s eyes. “Do not hurt anyone. We need only the ship.”
Flint ignored him and slunk through the crowd. Richard watched him go with a sigh. Between his pouch and Kaelen’s, they carried gold enough to buy a ship outright. But on balance, stealing a ship attracted less attention than two strange Ardenian men having the assets to purchase one.
The stall opposite caught Richard’s eye. It was a trinket shop. The wares were of the modest sort—clever things in brass and copper. A row of brooches. A pair of snake-shaped cuff studs.
And, in the centre, a silver chain bearing a sun.
Richard neared it. The pendant was no broader than two of his fingers together. A smooth golden disc with engraved sunburst patterns. Designed to sit at the hollow of a man’s throat.
It suited Kaelen, somehow. Perhaps it was the sun. Kaelen, who smiled, and the room grew warmer for it. Kaelen, who shone when he peered down at Richard with creased eyes and dimples.
“Ah, you’ve a good eye, good sir.” The stallholder was a small woman with an eager smile. “My best work, that one—you won’t find anything like it in the whole Seven Realms. The chain is real silver, sir. And the pendant is gold-plated. I swear it on me son’s bones.”
“It is lovely.” Richard turned it in his palm.
“And here’s the trick of it. Watch.” She leaned across to squeeze the sun three times. With a click, the pendant parted along an invisible seam, and the disc opened into a small compartment.
“For a lock of hair, sir.” The woman winked. “For a flower. For a message. A sweet promise, perhaps.” She produced a quill, an inkpot, and a tiny scrap of paper. “I provide the means, of course. Service on the house. Six gold pieces is all I ask.”
Richard smiled.
“Excellent. I shall take it.”
* * *
The ringing bells sounded half an hour later.
Heads lifted at once. Customers paused mid-haggle.
A baker wiped his hands on his apron and stepped out from behind his counter.
A cluster of young men broke from a wine stall, smirking.
Within a count of thirty, the lanes were a river of bodies streaming towards the main square.
Richard patted his inner pocket, where the sun pendant was now stored, and followed the crowd. There was a voice booming through a voice cone, and he knew, with a sickening certainty, that this herald at midday meant only one thing.
By the time he came out beneath the broad archway, Antlershield Square had become a sea. Four hundred paces across, and every pace of it filled. People stood on the fountain, straddled walls, and even climbed the lampposts.
Six soldiers were dragging a man to the post upon the raised dais.
He was starved, with a straggly beard and a chest mottled with bruises.
He could not properly use his right leg, so the soldiers half-carried him, scraping his feet across the flagstones.
They forced him to climb the steps to the dais, and when his leg failed him on the second step, he was hauled up by the hair. The crowd near the front laughed.
Richard’s stomach lurched.
The herald at the foot of the dais unrolled a scroll, and his voice boomed—magically enchanted.
“BY THE WILL OF HIS MAJESTY KING MARIUS OF ESTARA, ANTLERED LORD OF THE EASTERN COAST, FIRSTBORN OF THE LINE OF VEXMAR—”
Applause.
“—THE PRISONER NAMED PEDRON HOLM, OF THE LOWMARKET QUARTER, HAVING BEEN FOUND GUILTY BY THE KING’S MAGISTRATES OF THE CRIMES OF SEDITION, OF HARBOURING TRAITORS, OF FUNDING THE OUTLAW BAND KNOWN AS THE brOKEN STAG, AND OF CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE CROWN—”
The laughter had transformed now into a chant. Two syllables again and again, accompanied by the stomp of feet—
“Burn him. Burn him. Burn him.”
“—SHALL THIS DAY, IN THE SIGHT OF CROWN AND PEOPLE, BE PURIFIED BY THE SACRED FLAME OF IGNATIOUS, THAT HIS TREASON BE BURNED FROM HIM AND HIS SOUL DELIVERED THUS UNTO JUDGEMENT.”
The chant rose.
The soldiers had the man at the post now.
They pulled his arms wide along the horizontal bar and lashed his wrists with rope.
A soldier with a large jug stepped close and splashed a long stream of oil across the man’s head and face.
It ran down his legs and pooled at his feet, where the stack of wood received the rest.
The chant turned into a cheer, and Richard followed the crowd’s stare, inclining his neck upward, towards the balcony of the fortress.
Gauze curtains had been drawn back, and at the rail, lounged two figures.
Hatred blazed through Richard, sheer and vicious. It filled his chest in a boiling rush, and he bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood.
Marius had not changed.
He stood as Richard remembered him from the dozens of state banquets and diplomatic summits—tall, lean, in a pale blue tunic, with white hair scraped back from a high forehead. A thin, wrinkled mouth and cunning, hawkish eyes.
This. This was the man who had paid Sylari trolls to kill Ardenia’s royals. This was the man who had once called Haldric ‘old friend’ before stabbing the knife into his back.
Beside him stood a woman no older than Richard. She was beautiful. Fine-boned, with a curtain of maroon hair falling to her waist. She nuzzled her cheek against Marius’s shoulder, and he smiled down at her.
Richard tasted bile.
“You smiled at my father like that, you wretch. Across the wine. Across the bread. You smiled at him exactly so and had him butchered—”
The chant morphed into a hungry roar. Richard blanched as a soldier came forward with a flaming torch.
I cannot watch.
He pushed towards the rear of the crowd. A woman cursed him as he jostled her shoulder. The horde was packed so thickly that Richard felt their heat through his cloak, their breath on his cheeks, and smelt the reek of hundreds of people who had not bathed in days, and he could not get through—
The screaming began, and Richard knew the fire had been set alight.
Pedron Holm’s first sound was a high, thin keening. His second sound was worse—choked and shrill and desperate beyond measure—“Please! Please! I beg you!” The third sound was no word at all, just scream upon scream.
Nausea wracked Richard, and he staggered to a nearby pillar. Pressing his forehead against its stone, he gulped in deep breaths and willed himself not to vomit—
You wanted to come here, Sister?
The thought would not leave him.
For the sake of a sweet smile, you were willing to leave me for this hell?
He turned his head to the dais. The fire really blazed now, climbing up to Pedron’s elbows—and how the man screamed.
Richard saw, on the high balcony, that Marius was watching with an amused smile, as though this were a tourney.
Octavia, beside him, had lifted her hand to her mouth.
For an instant, Richard thought it was out of horror.
Then her shoulders shook, and he realised she was laughing into her own knuckles.
Is this the house you wish to join, Sister? Is this what you wish to be wed into? You, who cannot bear to watch a soldier be flogged—
The arrow came out of nowhere.
One moment, the mob was roaring, Pedron Holm was screaming, and then, something whistled through the air, fast—incredibly fast—and took Pedron Holm beneath the breastbone.
The man’s scream cut off. His head jerked once, then his chin dropped, and his body sagged in its ropes. The dreadful writhing ceased.
The crowd’s cheers splintered into shouts of confusion. Soldiers brandished swords and jostled outward into the press, bellowing for order, demanding to know which direction the arrow came from.
Fools. The direction was clear from the angle at which the arrow was embedded in Pedron. Richard traced backwards and swept his eyes along the square’s eastern flank. Up the colonnade. Up past the rows of shops and counting houses. Up to the rooftops—
And down. To the inn a few buildings from the archway Richard had entered through. On the sixth floor, in the third balcony from the left, a figure was lowering a bow.
He was hooded and shadowed by the slate eave. Already, he was shouldering his bow and turning.
Richard’s jaw dropped. He knew those broad shoulders, he knew that firm posture, he knew that blasted bow even—
You fool, you utter fool. Richard gritted his teeth and shoved through the throng towards the eastern streets. With any luck, he’d be able to intercept Kaelen and get him to safety.
The portcullis cranked open. Richard glanced over his shoulder in time to see soldiers pour out, barrelling through the mass.
Oh, Kaelen. What have you done?