I could have kissed him.
‘It’s a trick, you fools!’ Lady Cestina screamed, but her warning was too late: the Knights, trusting each other more than petty guardsmen, had formed up into a solid line, while the guards had split into two separate groups, half ready to fend off the Knights while the rest came at us. We were still outnumbered, of course, but with the guardsmen all in disarray, their tactics were useless – and the noble guests were helpfully shouting incoherent orders at their Knights and at each other while reaching for their own highly decorative weapons as they tried in vain to make sense of who was actually fighting whom.
‘Interesting,’ Kest noted absently, taking a short step to the left as one of the guards made a thrust for his chest. As the man overextended, Kest grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him off-balance, using his own momentum to send him tumbling over the railing and into the water. ‘Was the bit with the Knights part of your plan all along?’
‘Of course,’ I lied.
Chalmers ducked under an opponent’s wide slash. ‘So it’s true what people say about the great Falcio val Mond.’
‘What do they say?’ Brasti asked.
‘That he talks people to death.’ She rose up and drove the heel of her boot into the knee of her attacker and the man obligingly screamed, but the slightly awkward move left her unprepared when, despite the crack of his kneecap, the man managed a glancing slash across her right arm. The thin leather parted under the force of the blow, leaving a line of blood in its place.
‘You need a better coat,’ I said, piercing the man’s good leg and kicking him off the point, sending him falling backwards.
‘This was the best I could afford.’
‘Then you should stop crashing weddings,’ Brasti suggested, slashing his sword across the chest of one of the guardsmen. The cut didn’t get through the leather cuirass but it did make the man stumble, and Brasti kicked him hard enough in the belly to send him sprawling to the deck. ‘I quite like this barge, though. Do you suppose the Margrave would consider letting me borrow it once he’s done with it? I was thinking of asking a certain former assassin to marry me.’
‘You want to propose? To Darriana?’
The idea sent such a chill through me that I nearly got eviscerated by an axe. I countered with a thrust to the man’s hand and got lucky; his weapon went crashing to the deck while he fled out of the way, leaving someone else to come forward and try to finish the job he’d started.
Even Kest seemed perturbed by Brasti’s sudden revelation. ‘You do realise that, other than Trin, Darriana is quite possibly the deadliest woman alive?’
‘I can’t very well spend the rest of my life letting the two of you try to get me killed, can I?’ Brasti replied. ‘Time I let someone else have a go.’
I knew their strange relationship – she a former assassin with a jealous streak and he congenitally incapable of fidelity – had somehow continued despite the natural order of the universe, but I had no idea Brasti might ever seriously consider matrimony – to anyone.
‘Will you both please shut up?’ Chalmers asked, slicing open a guardsman’s hand with the broken end of her cutlass. ‘Some of us would rather not die today if we can avoid it.’
The guard howled in pain, but he cleverly grabbed at Chalmer’s face, and smeared the blood over her eyes to blind her as he cocked his other fist. Good move. Almost a shame Brasti had to drive his shoulder into the man’s side, pushing him over the railing and into the water.
‘If living matters to you then I’d suggest you stop running around pretending to be a Greatcoat,’ Brasti told her.
‘I’m just as much a Greatcoat as you are,’ she countered. ‘The King named me so himself, on his last day.’
That took me aback. Was this a lie, or yet one more decision King Paelis had made without telling me? I spared Chalmers a glance. There was something vaguely familiar about the girl, but I still couldn’t quite place her. Also, right now I had other concerns: the Knights and their Lords had formed their own little troop and were looming over the bodies of several dead or wounded guardsmen. By now most of them had figured out my ruse, but it was too late; only four of Evidalle’s guardsmen remained standing. Seeing the odds had turned against them, they dropped their weapons and sank to their knees next to their fallen comrades.
‘Stand up, damn you!’ the Margrave screamed, but no one moved, which was entirely sensible. Nobody ever wants to be the last person to die right before the battle ends.
Shattering the silence, Brasti slapped a hand on his thigh. ‘Now I remember you! Chalmers – the annoying little girl who used to hang around the King’s cook – what was her name? Zagdana?’ He turned to Kest. ‘You know what? This is proof the Gods do still exist. I may have finally found someone who knows how to cook a damned chicken.’
‘Her name was Zagdunsky and she was the Royal Quartermaster, you arse,’ Chalmers said to Brasti.
The Knights, none of whom appeared to be hurt, looked warily at us from across the pile of dead and injured guardsmen. One or two shuffled, as if they might be inclined to come for us, but I shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it, gentlemen. Not your fight.’
‘I remember you now as well,’ Kest said to Chalmers. ‘Though I seem to recall you looked quite different then.’
‘That’s right!’ Brasti said, pointing an accusing finger. ‘You were a tubby little thing, weren’t you?’ He looked her up and down appraisingly. ‘My, my, haven’t you grown up nicely . . .’
‘Didn’t you just announce your intention to propose to Darriana?’ Kest asked.
‘Yes, well, I can’t help it: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
‘That’s not what that sentence means.’
‘Is there any reason I can’t kill him?’ Chalmers asked me.
‘Wait until we’re sure the fight’s over.’ I called out to the Knights, ‘The fight is finished, isn’t it, gentlemen?’
A few of them glanced over their shoulders at the nobles they served, none of whom looked eager to take the chance that their man would fall to our blades and leave them vulnerable.
‘This is treason!’ Evidalle bellowed without the slightest trace of irony as he pounded his non-bleeding fist against the railing. ‘I will have justice for this!’
‘Well, well,’ Brasti said to me. ‘For once your plan hasn’t got us into worse trouble than we started with.’
‘Don’t speak so soon,’ Kest said, and pointed past the barge’s railing to the open waters beyond. In all the chaos of the battle none of us had noticed the ship rounding the bend in the river: a galleon was coming up fast behind us, flying a banner bearing the image of an eagle with talons extended over a field of blue and white.
‘Which one’s that?’ I asked.