Hers the stillness of the forest, rooted restlessness, oak-slow, pine-quick, a seething patience. Hers the stillness of ice walls that face the sea, clear and deep, blue secrets held cold against the truth of the world, a patience of aeons stacked against a sudden fall. Hers the stillness of a sorrow-born babe unmoving in its crib. And of the mother, frozen in her discovery, fleeting and forever.
Thorn held a silence that had grown old before first she saw the world’s light. A quietude passed down generations, the peace that bids us watch the dawn, an unspoken alliance with wave and flame that lets both take all speech from tongues and sets us standing before the water’s surge and swell, or waiting to bear witness to fire’s consuming dance of joy. Hers the silence of rejection, of a child’s hurt: mute, unknowing, a scar upon the years to come. Hers the unvoiced everything of first love, tongue-tied, ineloquent, the refusal to sully so sharp and golden a feeling with anything as blunt as words.
Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave as only those who’ve already lost can be.
Voices reached her, the Pelarthi calling out to each other as they lost sight of their numbers in the broken spaces of the plateau. Cries rang across the level ground, echoing from the pillars, flashes of torchlight, a multitude of footfalls, growing closer. Thorn rolled her shoulders beneath black skin armour. She tightened the fingers of each hand around the sharp weight of a throwing star, her breathing calm, heart racing.
‘In this place the dead watch me,’ she breathed. A shout broke out close at hand, figures glimpsed between two pillars, flitting across the gap. Many figures. ‘I am a weapon in service to the Ark. Those who come against me will know despair.’ Her voice rose along with the tension that always presaged a fight, a buzzing tingle across her cheekbones, a tightness in her throat, a sense of being both deep within her own body, and above and around it at the same time.
The first of the Pelarthi jogged into view, and seeing her, stumbled to a halt. A young man, beardless though hard-eyed beneath the iron of his helm. More crowded in behind him, spilling out into the killing ground.
The Red Sister tilted her head to acknowledge them.
Then it began.
1
No child truly believes they will be hanged. Even on the gallows platform with the rope scratching at their wrists and the shadow of the noose upon their face they know that someone will step forward, a mother, a father returned from some long absence, a king dispensing justice … someone. Few children have lived long enough to understand the world into which they were born. Perhaps few adults have either, but they at least have learned some bitter lessons.
Saida climbed the scaffold steps as she had climbed the wooden rungs to the Caltess attic so many times. They all slept there together, the youngest workers, bedding down among the sacks and dust and spiders. They would all climb those rungs tonight and whisper about her in the darkness. Tomorrow night the whispers would be spent and a new boy or girl would fill the empty space she left beneath the eaves.
‘I didn’t do anything.’ Saida said it without hope, her tears dry now. The wind sliced cold from the west, a Corridor wind, and the sun burned red, filling half the sky yet offering little heat. Her last day?
The guard prodded her on, indifferent rather than unkind. She looked back at him, tall, old, flesh tight as if the wind had worn it down to the bone. Another step, the noose dangling, dark against the sun. The prison yard lay near-deserted, a handful watching from the black shadows where the outer wall offered shelter, old women, grey hair trailing. Saida wondered what drew them. Perhaps being so old they worried about dying and wanted to see how it was done.
‘I didn’t do it. It was Nona. She even said so.’ She had spoken the words so many times that meaning had leached away leaving them just pale noise. But it was true. All of it. Even Nona said so.
The hangman offered Saida the thinnest of smiles and bent to check the rope confining her wrists. It itched and it was too tight, her arm hurt where Raymel had cracked it, but Saida said nothing, only scanned the yard, the doors to the cell blocks, the outer buildings, even the great gates to the world outside. Someone would come.
A door clanged open from the Pivot, a squat tower where the warden was said to live in luxury to rival any lord’s. A guardsman emerged, squinting against the sun. Just a guardsman: the hope, that had leapt so easily in Saida’s breast, crashed once more.
Stepping from behind the guardsman a smaller, wider figure. Saida looked again, hoping again. A woman in the long habit of a nun came walking into the yard. Only the staff in her hand, its end curled and golden, marked her office.
The hangman glanced across, his narrow smile replaced by a broad frown. ‘The abbess …’
‘I ain’t seen her down here before.’ The old guardsman tightened his fingers on Saida’s shoulder.
Saida opened her mouth but found it too dry for her thoughts. The abbess had come for her. Come to take her to the Ancestor’s convent. Come to give her a new name and a new place. Saida wasn’t even surprised. She had never truly thought she would be hanged.
2
The stench of a prison is an honest one. The guards’ euphemisms, the public smile of the chief warden, even the building’s fa?ade, may lie and lie again, but the stink is the unvarnished truth: sewage and rot, infection and despair. Even so, Harriton prison smelled sweeter than many. A hanging prison like Harriton doesn’t give its inmates the chance to rot. A brief stay, a long drop on a short rope, and they could feed the worms at their leisure in a convict ditch-grave up at the paupers’ cemetery in Winscon.
The smell bothered Argus when he first joined the guard. They say that after a while your mind steps around any smell without noticing. It’s true, but it’s also true of pretty much every other bad thing in life. After ten years Argus’s mind stepped around the business of stretching people’s necks just as easily as it had acclimatized to Harriton’s stink.
‘When you leaving?’ Dava’s obsession with everyone else’s schedule used to annoy Argus, but now he just answered without thought or memory. ‘Seventh bell.’
‘Seventh!’ The little woman rattled out her usual outrage at the inequities of the work rota. They ambled towards the main holding block, the private scaffold at their back. Behind them Jame Lender dangled out of sight beneath the trapdoor, still twitching. Jame was the graveman’s problem now. Old Man Herber would be along soon enough with his cart and donkey for the day’s take. The short distance to Winscon Hill might prove a long trip for Old Herber, his five passengers, and the donkey, near as geriatric as its master. The fact that Jame had no meat on him to speak of would lighten the load. That, and the fact two of the other four were small girls.
Herber would wind his way through the Cutter Streets and up to the Academy first, selling off whatever body parts might have a value today. What he added to the grave-ditch up on the Hill would likely be much diminished – a collection of wet ruins if the day’s business had been good.
‘… sixth bell yesterday, fifth the day before.’ Dava paused the rant that had sustained her for years, an enduring sense of injustice that gave her the backbone to handle condemned men twice her size.
‘Who’s that?’ A tall figure was knocking at the door to the new arrivals’ block with a heavy cane.
‘Fellow from the Caltess? You know.’ Dava snapped her fingers before her face as if trying to surprise the answer out. ‘Runs fighters.’
‘Partnis Reeve!’ Argus called the name as he remembered it and the big man turned. ‘Been a while.’
Partnis visited the day-gaol often enough to get his fighters out of trouble. You don’t run a stable of angry and violent men without them breaking a few faces off the payroll from time to time, but generally they didn’t end up at Harriton. Professional fighters usually keep a calm enough head to stop short of killing during their bar fights. It’s the amateurs who lose their minds and keep stamping on a fallen opponent until there’s nothing left but mush.