Pennyblade E-Book

J.L. Worrad

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 509

Beschreibung

A sharp-tongued disgraced-noble-turned-mercenary has to stop the world collapsing into chaos in this gripping, savagely funny epic fantasy packed with unforgettable characters, for fans of Joe Abercrombie.Exile. Mercenary. Lover. Monster. Pennyblade.Kyra Cal'Adra has spent the last four years on the Main, living in exile from her home, her people, her lover and her past. A highblood commrach – the ancient race of the Isle, dedicated to tradition and the perfection of the blood – she's welcome among the humans of the Main only for the skill of her rapier, her preternatural bladework. They don't care which of the gleaming towers she came from, nor that her grandmother is matriarch of one of Corso's most powerful families.But on the main, women loving women is a sin punishable by death. Kyra is haunted by the ghost of Shen, the love of her life, a lowblood servant woman whom Kyra left behind as she fled the Isle.When a simple contract goes awry, and her fellow pennyblades betray her, Kyra is set onto a collision course with her old life, and the age-old conflict between the Main and the Isle threatens to erupt once more.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

1 THE MAIN, West Hosshire, March 881

2 THE ISLE, Corso, June 876

3 THE MAIN, West Hosshire, March 881

4 THE ISLE, Corso, June 876

5 THE MAIN, Hoxham, March 881

6 THE ISLE, Corso, June, 876

7 THE MAIN, Hoxham, March 881

Part Two

8 THE ISLE, Hinterwoods, August 876

9 THE MAIN, Southern Spine, March 881

10 THE ISLE, The Observatory, Hinterwoods, August 876

11 THE MAIN, Nosford Abbey, The Brintland, March 881

12 THE ISLE, Corso, March 877

13 THE MAIN, Becken-on-Brint, April 881

14 THE ISLE, Corso, March 877

Part Three

15 THE MAIN, Becken-on-Brint, April 881

16 THE ISLE, Corso, March 877

17 THE MAIN, Becken-on-Brint, April 881

18 THE ISLE, Corso, May 877

19 THE MAIN, North-West Brintland, April 881

20 THE ISLE, Darrad, June 877

21 THE MAIN, Coastal Highway, April 881

22 THE ISLE, Corso, June 877

23 THE MAIN, Devil’s Caves Clifftops, April 881

24 THE ISLE, Corso, June 877

25 THE MAIN, Devil’s Caves, April 881

26 THE ISLE, Corso Harbour, September 877

27 THE MAIN, Irvingsport, The Brintland, April 881

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.com,

Amazon.co.uk,

Goodreads,

Barnes & Noble,

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

Pennyblade

Print edition ISBN: 9781789097610

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789097627

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© J. L. Worrad 2022. All Rights Reserved.

J. L. Worrad asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Matt, who bears some responsibility.

1

THE MAIN, West Hosshire, March 881

I stumbled along the dirt path with a bag over my head. I thought of you, Shen; strange that I should think of you.

‘Easy, girl,’ the innkeep said, hands tight on my shoulders.

April-sharp air in my nostrils. Boots sinking, slipping in the mud.

I thought I’d see more through the hessian blindfold, but the light that bled through only dazzled my eyes. The long dress they’d made me wear hindered my stride.

‘Easy now…’

‘Shut up,’ I hissed.

‘Easy.’

‘I said put a cock in it.’

The innkeep shut up. Peasant.

Clearly, I was drunker than I thought. Not drunk drunk, but subject to that weathering of sobriety that only three whole days spent in an inn can procure. By the second night none of us thought this Rossley arse would ever show up.

Awful plan. Awful.

I smelled rain-soaked wood. Fresh-cut. We’d entered the timber yard.

‘What’s that?’ a man ahead of us shouted. Rossley, I assumed.

‘I can explain!’ the innkeep shouted next to me.

I tensed, half expecting an arrow in the belly. None came.

‘That’s not the girl.’ The voice was more refined than I’d expected.

An ox lowed nearby.

‘Girl ran,’ the innkeep said. I knew we were close now.

‘Bloody find her then,’ the voice said.

We halted.

‘She ran, sir,’ the innkeep replied. ‘Swear.’

‘Then I’ll have my money, eh?’

Rossley was right before me. I smelled perfume, lavender and spikenard, heard the fabric of his clothes as he made some gesture.

The innkeep sniffed. His fingers tightened on my shoulders.

‘Thought this might do.’

The bag came off. Noon blinded me. A man’s silhouette loomed, its head shaped like a mushroom. Presumably a bad haircut. My eyes watered and I pretended to sob.

‘Pilgrim’s mercy,’ the man muttered. ‘This is…’

‘Real beauty, in’t she?’ the innkeep said.

‘She’s—’

‘But see the comely olive skin, sir. Her hair like raven’s wi—’

‘End the sonnet, you arse. She’s a fucking sprite!’

Awful plan. Awful.

*   *   *

Ah, but, Shen, I get ahead of myself, to the tune of an hour or more. Forever rash, you and I, do you recall? Our shared fault.

She smelled of violets and yeast, the innkeep’s wife, and in the cellar’s gloom I seized my chance. I pressed against her back as she stood over a barrel, slipped my arms around her waist. My face was in her blonde hair, my lips upon her neck.

‘Turn around,’ I told her. Blood pulsed in me, as it did whenever I drove steel into flesh. ‘Taste my lips.’

She shivered. ‘Wouldn’t be… right.’

‘I’ll tell you what isn’t right,’ I said, licking her neck, sucking her earlobe. ‘Your boredom.’ I reached up, seized her tits and rubbed them. Classic human dugs: formidable and heaving. Way I like them. ‘I want to wake you. I want you to bloom…’

She pressed her wide arse into my crotch.

‘Devilry,’ she muttered. ‘Pure devilry.’ Oh, I had her now. The sky-madness was always their last defence. ‘Perverse. Uh, twice perverse.’

‘Surely we can beat twice,’ I whispered. ‘If we really try…’

She turned around. The afternoon light, peering in from the half-open coal scuttle – the only light in the cellar – caught her face like a pale mask. She was good for her years, with a plumpness to her cheeks that lent youth. Wide brown eyes. She placed her hand against my face, and I kissed her palm, made passionate eyes. She stroked the sharp of my ear, the pointed tip. Humans always do for some reason.

I feigned ecstasy.

‘One kiss,’ I whispered. ‘One.’ I leaned in.

My lips pressed to hers. So gentle. I lashed the tip of my tongue over her upper lip, then left one little secondary kiss and pulled back.

‘How was that?’ I asked her.

‘Tastes like strawberry.’ She touched her lips. ‘An’ it tingles…’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘And merely your mouth.’

Her face fell blank. She stared at me.

‘Alright, fae-wench,’ she said. She sat down on the barrel and lifted her skirts. ‘Stoop.’

‘Well, since you insist.’

I got down on my knees.

Someone banged on the door to the cellar.

‘Kyra!’ Young Ned’s voice behind the thick – and locked – timber door. ‘Kyra! It’s on!’

I screwed up my eyes.

‘Me husband’s back,’ the innkeep’s wife said. She stood up and stroked down her skirts.

I got to my feet. ‘Alright, Ned!’ I shouted at the door. I looked at my intended. ‘Tonight then? I need you.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘’Tis devilry, woman.’

She barged past me and was already up the stairs to the inn. She opened the door and barged right past Ned too.

‘She alright?’ he asked me.

‘What is it?’ I strode to the bottom of the stairs and gazed up at the young man. All lank hair and pimples, Ned. Wet puppy eyes above a donkey nose.

‘Rossley’s arrived at the timber yard,’ he answered. ‘He’s waiting.’

I shook my head and sighed. Three nights in this bleak shithole, and this Rossley arse elects to shamble into the village just as I’m promised a helping of tongue purse. He was more than another mark now. Oh, he was my nemesis – at least for today.

Ned headed back to the barroom. I stretched, shook my head, then noticed an earthenware bottle of wine sat in a nook below the stone stairs. I brightened. A drop of that would see me right, lend me some moral fibre for the coming fiasco. Frankly, the inn had been irresponsible not to offer me a preparatory nip.

The nook reeked of a hundred dead candles and possessed a dusty layer of melted tallow speckled with blackened wicks. I had to prise the bottle free of the wax with a deft twist. I pulled out the cork and a stink – half sour milk and half piss – assaulted my nostrils. I popped the cork back before I retched and spat on the floor. What a shithole village.

Something else on the ledge caught my eye: a fist-sized object I could not discern in the gloom. I picked the thing up and held it up to what light there was.

A human figure, crafted from the same earthenware as the bottle. Crude in aspect, cruder than even the majority of human art. It had two tiny arms that grasped at its own pot belly. Two legs, backward-kneed and hoofed like a goat. The artist had taken great pains with the prick, which was ornate in its rigidity, a veiny spike amid a whirl of pubes. Yet it was the figure’s head that drew me – someone had bound it in coarse yarn, tight to the skull. Empty divots gouged out of the yarn were the creature’s eyes and mouth. The masked face had a vile grin, as if holding back the punchline of some cruel joke.

I put the bottle and the figurine back. It was the sort of rustic fuckery I’d come to expect from the more inbred enclaves of Hosshire, and experience told me searching for reasons would only procure the most imbecilic, depressing and dribble-flecked answers.

Speaking of which…

I climbed the steps to the barroom to be greeted by Ned and two other faces I’d tired of. First the innkeep, newly returned from the timber yard, grey hair wild as briar and his expression a very lighthouse of ignorance. He clearly had not figured out I’d tried to swive his wife. They never did.

Shortleg, by the bar, tankard in hand, smiled knowingly. At least his plump whore wasn’t about. Likely she was wasting our ever-depleting kitty elsewhere.

‘Bad news,’ the innkeep said. He was stood by the front door. ‘He’s three men this time.’

‘Three? You said he always has one.’

‘He does always have one.’

I waved a finger at him. ‘That’s another forty pips, right there. Twenty a head.’

‘We ain’t got forty pip’strells,’ he said.

‘You have or we walk.’

‘Kyra, love,’ Shortleg said, putting his tankard down and waving a gloved hand. Big ugly fat bastard, Shortleg, top of his skull like dying scrubland. ‘C’mon. For me. For, you know, the public good and that.’

Shortleg hailed from Tettleby, or thereabouts. Probably knew the girls’ parents. Frankly, my public spirit was weak as the innkeep’s fucking beer. But Shortleg’s loyalty was… useful, I suppose.

‘Thirty,’ I uttered with finality. Last night I’d noticed the hook-shaped patch above the bar. These God-fearing rustics had even sold their symbols of the Church. You can’t squeeze them for much more after that.

‘If three men’s too much…’ the innkeep’s wife said from behind the bar.

‘I said I’ll do it.’ By the Blood, she was shaming my valour already. The nerve of the woman.

Coward! Fucking coward. The memory came, sudden and clear as shattering glass. Your words, Shen, barked at me in a wrecked market square, four years past. The fresh morning, the onyx towers of the city, the way I’d turned and laughed in your face. Your blood-stained forehead and wild red hair. The moon follows the sun, Shen, and a memory of you as assuredly follows whenever I try to fuck a woman. Sooner or later.

I was staring at the tiled floor. A silence had filled the barroom. An uncertainty.

‘What were you doing downstairs?’ I heard the innkeep ask his wife.

‘Shifting a barrel,’ I told him, looking up.

Shortleg drank from his tankard to hide his grin.

‘Ned,’ I said. ‘Where’s that dress?’

He brought it over as I unbuckled my long jacket and threw it on a table. The dress was white, long-sleeved and muslin. Humans have a custom for their men in one kind of finery, their women in another. Why is anyone’s guess. I’d gained a taste for dresses on a girl in my four years on the Main, but not for wearing them.

‘Awful plan,’ I said. ‘Should have let me plan.’

‘It’ll work,’ Shortleg, our gambit’s originator, insisted. ‘You’ll have a bag on your head.’

‘I’m pretty tall for a ten-year-old, don’t you think?’

‘I’ve seen ten-year-olds your height,’ Ned said, still holding the dress.

‘Aye,’ Shortleg said. ‘But it dun’t matter because you’re not—’

‘Shortleg,’ I said. ‘I’ve tits, you bollock.’

‘You’re not meant to be ten,’ Shortleg said, like I was the idiot. ‘That’s not the plan. We tell him Tettleby’s outta sprogs.’

‘Shortleg—’

‘Every man wants to fuck an elf slag, Kyra. Ain’t a man on the Main ain’t pulled his plank over that notion.’ He nodded, sipped his beer. ‘Well, ’cept arse-bandits…’

‘They’d think about elf cock,’ the innkeep added helpfully.

Shortleg gave him a look of disgust and disappointment, a common reaction to such things on the mainland. ‘Cheers for clarifying.’ He turned and casually gestured for me to get a move on.

I glared at him, snatched the dress off Ned and worked it over my vest and trousers. ‘Most humans haven’t even seen my kind.’

Shortleg laughed. ‘You’re pretty, Kyra, elf-pretty. Nice face. Nice body. He’ll take.’

‘Shouldn’t say “elf”,’ Ned told the room. ‘Sprite neither. They don’t like it. She’s a come-rat.’

‘Commrach,’ I corrected him. I took a deep breath. ‘Sorry, Ned. And… thank you.’

‘S’alright.’

‘Right,’ I said, trying to muster what remained of the de facto command I usually enjoyed, despite the dress. ‘Ned. Short. Get going.’

‘Me beer…’ Shortleg said.

‘Take it with you. Circle the timber yard on either side, one left, one right. Stay hidden.’

‘Don’t tell me me plan,’ Shortleg said.

‘You know the exact shed right?’ I asked.

‘Course,’ Shortleg said.

‘Course,’ Ned said.

‘Because it’s a big timber yard. More than one shed.’ I stared at them both. ‘Right?’

‘Course,’ they replied in unison.

Such allies. How I’d come down in the world.

*   *   *

My eyes had adjusted to the daylight. Rossley’s bellend head was, indeed, a centre parting of blond that clutched tight to his crown and sprung up at the ends. His eyes were classic piggy-squinters, his moustache a piss-soaked string: yellow and foetid. Behind him and all about rose dark piles of felled trees.

‘We ain’t got no gold, sir,’ the innkeep said. ‘And, as I say, the girl ran. So I thought this might show Tettleby’s good faith like.’

‘Can you believe this, gentlemen?’ Rossley said.

I sneaked a look around. Rossley was well turned out: yellow jacket, quality dye. No blade. A pleasing eccentricity.

At his right stood a man with a tattoo on either cheek: goat’s eyes below his actual pair. A falchion at his belt; a human weapon, half-sword, half-cleaver. To Rossley’s left stood an ox and cart. Nothing on it save a lump under a tarpaulin. Two shitkickers – straw-haired like most humans of the Main – stood before the cart’s wheel. They’d homemade longknives in cloth scabbards, the sword choice of scum. All three pennyblades shook their head in answer to Rossley’s question.

I’d seen this setup before: the money, the paid iron, the iron’s two gormless friends. Remove the first two and your job’s done. Likely Ned, with his bow, had figured that too.

‘You think this is what I like, yes?’ Rossley asked the innkeep.

‘Different,’ the innkeep said. ‘You’re…’

‘I’m what? A degenerate?’

‘Refined.’

‘Wetting my length in a soulless abomination? You call that refinement?’ Oh, he would definitely have me stabbed, if only for emphasis. ‘This is respect in Tettleby, hmm? Throw your guests a bloody caliban?’

‘I’m not a caliban,’ I muttered, before I could stop myself. Pixie I’d take. Elf even. Not that.

He slapped me. I bent over with the stinging pain. My eyes watered and I moaned. I drew it out into the most pitiful mewl.

‘Please…’ I begged.

I saw Rossley’s stance change, hiding a growing root. Probably. I mean, fuck, I’m no expert.

He grabbed my chin and looked in my eyes.

‘I suppose there is something,’ he said. ‘A fine face, youthful complexion.’

‘Pale bronze like summer’s honey,’ the innkeep added, ever the fucking poet. ‘And those eyes like polished amethyst…’

Evidently Shortleg had been right about all men’s imp fetish.

‘Please don’t hurt me,’ I said, trying to sound my most pitiful. An ugly sort of bait, but they’re like that, the human men.

‘Come along,’ Rossley said.

The innkeep let go and I followed.

Rossley stopped. ‘Binds,’ he said to Goat-Eyes.

Goat-Eyes pulled out thin cord handcuffs and bound my wrists. We had not planned for this. He grinned and his breath smelled of onions. At least he hadn’t bound my wrists behind my back.

‘If she isn’t pure,’ Rossley said to the innkeep, ‘I’ll know.’

The shed lay atop a small muddy rise forty feet behind where Rossley stood. Where he took those girls. Where he fucked them, threw them aside like old fruit and plucked the next. Because he had money. Because money bought blades. Pennyblades.

Piles of logs rose either side of us, thirty feet high. Ned up on one pile, Shortleg behind the other, in theory. I couldn’t see them. I didn’t dare look up.

Rossley didn’t hold me as we walked. He followed, steps behind, like a servant wary of his mistress’s appointments, urging her on politely. He hadn’t checked me over, the fool. Blood, I could have carried a dagger all the way.

I’d still do my part, despite bound wrists. He was large, but only his money lent him iron, as the Hosshire folk say. Whereas I…

Well, the commrach word for youth meant ‘blade’, for we are taught to wield one the moment we can walk. I was twenty-three now. Count the days.

But were my boys ready? I didn’t put it past them to have got lost in this yard and its labyrinth of dead wood. The innkeep had said the forests around Tettleby had bear traps. For all I knew they might be screaming their balls off betwixt iron jaws.

Five steps led up the rise to the shed.

‘Punishment awaits,’ Rossley said.

I thought that very perceptive.

Not even a door, just a length of sackcloth that hung from hooks. He pushed it back and ushered me in.

I knew the layout of the shed, the position of my weapons. A stiletto under the stained and sheetless bed by the wall: for the gutting. My rapier, that love of my life, sat in the tool pantry next to the doorway. That would be for sweeping the last of the scum outside, should my colleagues be tardy.

The little man lying on the bed was new though. He looked up, a wide-brimmed hat obscuring his features so I could only make out his beard. An empty goatskin sat atop his pot belly. He reeked of cider.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Rossley demanded.

‘Work here,’ the man said, high-pitched and slurred. ‘Who the—’

‘Robert Rossley.’

The man had clearly heard of him. He stumbled to his feet, goatskin in hand.

‘Soz, pal,’ he said in a high croaky voice. ‘I were having a clean-up…’

‘Commendable,’ Rossley said. ‘Now fuck off.’

‘Soz.’ The man stumbled past us, head bowed and face obscured.

Rossley breathed out. ‘Despicable.’

I pretended to break down. I fell to my knees then dropped on my left side. I flailed my arms up and down in feigned terror, my hands searching under the bed.

My stiletto was gone.

Rossley grabbed my shoulders and lifted me up. Stronger than he looked, and I was nothing without a blade. That damned drunk: he really had cleaned up. Hocked my knife for cider.

Rossley threw me face-down on the bed. My tied hands lay under my collarbone, my knees on the dirty floor. My arse in the air, albeit beneath skirt and trousers. I heard Rossley groan low.

Fear hadn’t kicked in. I wouldn’t let this sad sack of shit humiliate me, couldn’t think like that. Had to buy time till the boys turned up.

‘Show me your prick,’ I said.

‘What?’

I started humping the bed. I made scandalous faces.

‘Stop it,’ Rossley said, his chin quivering and his brow furrowed. ‘That’s… stop it.’

I ceased my humping and looked him in the eyes. ‘I’m experienced, Rossley. I’ll teach you things.’ I licked my incisors. ‘Pixie things.’

Face of a child, Rossley. A terrified boy behind a ridiculous moustache.

‘Liar,’ he barked. ‘Liar! You’re a virgin, you whore. You bloody fairy-maiden-witch!’

‘Show us your broomstick.’ I giggled. ‘I’ll ride through the night!’

That did for him. He looked around the room.

‘Beat you,’ he said. ‘B-beat…’

He turned to look in the tool pantry. I pushed myself off the bed and leapt at him. We commrach are fast, nimble as hares. I slipped my leather bind over his head, pulled my wrists back tight. He gurgled, groaned, his hands clawing at me. I drove my boot into his spine and held it there.

Not my skill set. I’d never strangled anyone in my life.

It showed. Rossley grabbed my fists and it took all my strength to keep them there. He lumbered sideways, threw himself at the wall before the pantry doorway. My shoulder hit timber and I yelled.

No great mind, Rossley. I’d have lurched for the tool pantry, found something sharp, but he chose instead to run out of the shed. He stumbled through sackcloth and into daylight, me on his back. He tripped, fell face first on the steps and I fell atop him. Something cracked. Rossley stopped moving.

I looked up. His men were forty yards away, all of them alive, untouched by Ned or Shortleg. Staring at the virginal faerie maiden with a garrotte around their dead boss’s neck.

I stared back.

Goat-Eyes drew his sword.

I lifted Rossley’s big head and worked the leather cord over it, freeing myself if not my hands.

Goat-Eyes was strutting over.

I ran, back into the shed and into the pantry.

There: the swept hilt and the black blade, the patterns of silver. All of it a-piece, beauty made metal, elegance forged.

My rapier. Forty inches of death.

I pulled it out from behind a crate. Hilt in my right hand, left hand tethered to right, I ran out again.

Goat-Eyes made to grab me.

I leapt away, then retreated three paces along the rise and pointed my blade at him.

‘Shh, hen,’ he said, no anger on his tattooed face. He had a thick Ralbride accent. ‘Wha’s tha’ ye got, hen?’ He laughed. His ugly blade waited in his hand. ‘Knitting needle, is it?’

Like most humans, he’d never seen a rapier before. Savage.

His two blond friends waited at the bottom of the rise, their longknives drawn, ready to gut me if I made to run.

‘Put it doon, hen,’ he said, smiling. He stepped forward, soft as a panther. ‘Won’t warn ya twi—’

Three jabs to his heart. He didn’t even lift his blade. Goat-Eyes looked at me like I’d tumbled his sister, then he fell forward.

I drove my rapier’s point into his spine. He shuddered. I dropped to my knees, threw my wrists over the freestanding hilt and sliced the leather binds on the eight inches of sharp at the point. I stood up and pulled the rapier out. Blood pooled in the rain-turned mud, I could smell it.

I looked down on the two shitkickers waiting at the bottom of the rise. I swung my rapier through the air and the steel sang. It sprayed red droplets, the silver glyphs along its length stretching and warping and dancing as I worked the hilt. Commrach steel. Sorcerous alloy.

I bared my teeth – such dainty razors – and hissed. I’d make a pretty monster in their tales to their grandkids, I thought.

They ran.

They made thirty yards before an arrow hit the rearmost one in the neck. From the opposite direction came Shortleg, barrelling along. He lifted his axe high and brought it down on the fallen man. The other man kept running.

I leaped down from the muddy rise and strutted toward Shortleg.

‘Nice work, love,’ he told me. He grinned.

I swung my rapier at him like I was swinging a club. Not to kill, yet more than enough to scare.

‘Donkeyfucker!’ I yelled. I swung again and again. ‘Feckless bull-buggering arsehole!’

‘Oi!’ He stumbled back.

‘Where were you? Where fucking were you? Have you any idea, I…’

The anger went out of me. I was breathing too fast and I began to shake.

‘Sorry,’ he said with a shamefaced smile. ‘Wrong shed.’

I wiped my brow, took deep breaths. I’d only been on the Main four years and, despite one close call in the first week, I still hadn’t absorbed the powerful danger of human men, that they could do what Rossley did. I wouldn’t have partaken in such a remorselessly stupid plan if I had.

I heard a scuffle behind me, and turned to see the innkeep kicking the shit out of Rossley’s corpse and swearing. I looked back at Shortleg.

Shortleg shrugged. ‘He’s paying. Can do what he likes.’

I nodded, my hands shaking. I tried to sheathe my sword and remembered the scabbard was back in the shed.

Ned came around some timber with his bow in hand. He took one look at me and knew not to say anything. Wise for his years.

‘Time to divvy up,’ Shortleg told him. He was already bent over, checking the nearest corpse.

‘Rossley and his big bastard are mine,’ I said. ‘No arguments.’

‘What about the cart?’ Ned asked.

I’d forgotten about that.

The three of us walked over to it. The ox ignored us, blithe to the slaughter of its owners. We walked around the back of the cart. The tarpaulin, with its head-sized lump, lay on the cart’s flatbed. Ned looked at me and, when I nodded, pulled the tarpaulin off.

A square lump of dried clay, ripples all down its sides.

‘What’s that?’ Ned said.

‘Aww fuck,’ Shortleg said.

‘Look at the top, Ned,’ I said. I shuddered.

‘There’s a seal,’ Ned said. ‘A crown.’

‘Tax money, Ned,’ I told him. ‘Sealed in clay.’

His mouth fell wide. ‘We’ll hang…’

‘Hey!’ Shortleg shouted at the innkeep. ‘Whyn’t you tell us he were a tax man?’

Apparently satisfied with kicking cadavers, the innkeep walked toward us.

‘Thought you knew,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You’re from round here, Shortleg. Everyone round here knows Rossley.’

‘I ain’t been here for years,’ Shortleg said. ‘I hadn’t a frigging clue, pal.’

The innkeep shook his head. ‘No wonder you lot were cheap.’

‘Twat!’ Shortleg snapped. ‘Dun’t believe this.’

The point of my rapier went under the innkeep’s chin.

‘You’re with us in this,’ I told him. ‘Don’t think we won’t point the finger. You’re the ringleader.’ I spat at the ground. ‘The brains.’

‘I know,’ he said, terrified. ‘I’m ready for that.’ He winced. ‘I couldn’t take that bastard no more. None of us could. Whole village.’ He collected himself. ‘Go get your stuff from mine. Get moving. I’ll clean up here.’

I lowered my blade. No one said anything.

‘What about the one that run?’ Ned said eventually.

No one spoke.

‘What do we do?’ Ned said. ‘Kyra? What do we do?’

‘We take the money.’

‘But it’s the Crown’s.’

I shrugged.

‘We’ll hang for Rossley. Can the rope bite worse for taking his gold?’

2

THE ISLE, Corso, June 876

‘We’ll miss the parade, Kyran,’ I said to my brother as I watched the less-than-heaving crowds sixteen floors below my open window. They were being made to split either side of the street in readiness for the Shame Parade. The evening was warm and my own freshly dabbed perfume filled my nostrils: jasmine and lily. I was eager to get out there. To be seen.

‘Kyra my dear,’ he replied, ‘one cannot rush the fucking immaculate.’

I didn’t look back at him. He’d only be gawping in his long mirror on the other side of his boudoir, all fuss and eyeliner and combs. I straightened my black longjacket and checked my nails. Satisfied, I gazed down upon the basalt paved street once more.

The crowd wore their festival masks, all identical in shape if not material, and from this height – and beneath the silver glow of a hundred hanging moontiles – the face of every citizen was a shining blank. The many roofs of our district rose above them, and beyond those roofs, right out to the horizon, stood the towers of the other families, lithe columns of onyx and wrought iron terminating in bulbous spires. From our tower, I had a perfect view.

‘You’ll be wearing a mask,’ I told Kyran. ‘Why dally over rouge and powder? It’ll be a mask beneath a mask.’

‘Good,’ he replied, his lips half-still as he applied something. ‘One can never have too many.’

‘Sirs,’ came a familiar voice from the boudoir’s doorway.

I turned to see ‘Slow’ Thezda Sil’Thezda, her twin silver monocles glinting beneath the light of the moontile chandelier above. A year older than us, Thezda was a bondswoman to the Cal’Adras. Her family had protected ours for generations.

‘Thezda?’ I said.

Thezda made a languid gesture to the corridor behind her.

‘Masks,’ she explained. Thezda had a certain way, eschewing all unnecessary words or movements. Her rapier style was infamously as lean.

I nodded, and Thezda ushered in a lowblood servant holding a tray with mine and my brother’s masks upon it. The servant boy wore a rabbit mask of lacquered pine. All the lowblood castes wore animal masks during the Festival of Youth. Rabbits, deer, fish: all the hunted creatures.

I permitted the boy to approach and took my mask from his platter. It was an abstract rendition of the ideal commrach face, as predicted by our natural philosophers, the Explainers, and strived toward by their breeding programme.

The Final Countenance: perfectly symmetrical, androgynous, beautiful in that way that’s hard to recall once you cease looking at it. I’d seen that face all my life. In truth, I was more intrigued by my own reflection caught in the mask’s silver leaf surface. By the Blood, I thought, I’m so pretty it’s a scandal.

As was my twin brother Kyran, his face as close to mine as to be almost identical. He was away from his standing mirror now, his ritual of fuss complete. He stood beside me and took his own mask from the platter. It was exactly the same as mine. As all the highbloods’. He hung it around his neck.

‘I see no difference,’ I said to him, pointing at the cosmetics on his face. He’d done his thing of adding and removing to no good end. I knew his ways.

‘Of course not,’ Kyran replied. ‘You’ve no eye for the sublime.’ He laughed and rubbed my mop of black hair, the same style as his own. ‘Now do come along, Ra-ra. We’ll miss the parade.’

We made our way down our tower’s wide and curling stairwell of onyx, Thezda two steps behind us. We passed black-and-white frescoes recalling our family’s greatest deeds, sinuous figures moving through landscapes of brushwork and pattern, languid beneath ink-black stars.

‘It’s not the usual cretin this year,’ Kyran said, referring to the parade. ‘I suppose he must have died.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘The fewer Roshos the better.’ I rested my palm upon the pommel of my rapier. I would look fine, posed like that. The women in the crowd would love it.

‘It’s some young man now,’ Kyran said. ‘They say he’s been bawling from the moment he got off the ship.’

‘Nice,’ I replied. ‘Mother would have liked that little detail.’

‘Yes.’ He looked at me and we both smiled. ‘I do believe she would have.’

We passed by slit windows as we descended, the sound of harps and chatter rising as we did so. Odd to think the Roshos once had a tower such as this, similarly daubed with their own family’s triumphs, all forgotten now. They had been Cal’Rosho back then. An act of incompetence had torn the ‘Cal’ from their name and brought them exile. It had also, in a roundabout way, taken our mother.

‘Why do we let them live?’ I said, surprising myself. ‘Each year they send someone to be humiliated and we send them back.’ I shook my head. ‘By the Blood, why didn’t we just kill them all from the first?’

Kyran descended more quickly, though only a touch. ‘We do not have a say in the matter.’

‘Not us, Ran-ran,’ I replied. ‘I mean all the tower-families and the Explainers and, well, our entire Isle.’ When my brother made no answer, I looked over my shoulder at Thezda. ‘Do you know? Answer me, Thezda.’

Requests for opinion always discomforted our bondswoman. I got a mean sort of joy from making them.

‘Explainers,’ she answered with a shrug. ‘Their decree.’

‘Then they were too soft,’ I said, more to Kyran than Thezda. ‘We all are. The Rosho’s high breeding shouldn’t protect them. We should have slain them all, from cot to cane.’

‘That’s anger talking,’ Kyran said.

‘Common sense,’ I replied.

Kyran snorted. ‘How often the former masquerades as the latter.’ He shook a pointed finger. ‘I’ll tell you both why we send their offering back home each year: death would be a release. An honour even. Humiliation is the greater punishment. Rather obvious when one thinks of it.’ He looked at me and grinned. ‘Do try and catch up, eh?’

His smugness vanished when he saw Grandmother stood on the chequered floor of the entrance hall, her guards flanking her. She glared at us hawkishly, an image only enriched by her hands, with their talon jewellery, resting on her walking cane like a bird of prey’s feet.

The three of us stopped upon the stairs, uncertain.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ Grandmother rasped. ‘You’re late enough as it is.’ She sneered. ‘Dissolute toads.’

Kyran coughed, then waved a hand and carried on walking down the black stone stairs, me in tow.

‘Our apologies, Grandmother,’ Kyran said. ‘We’re—’

‘Late,’ Grandmother said, finishing his sentence.

If only you were, I thought. I did not voice it. She had had me caned for less.

The three of us crossed the hall. Along the walls the pewter statues gleamed in their alcoves. They had been freshly imbued, and even now a few servants were caressing the figurines, drawing out the pewter’s vitality and the sculptor’s passion.

I glanced at the sculptures so as not to meet Grandmother’s eyes. Maudlin youths and dancing maidens, all bright and alive though never moving, at least not when one looked at them directly. Yet I could not ignore my fate forever. Grandmother awaited me on the other side of the onyx and marble floor like some particularly mean-faced cliff. All confidence and joy would dash against her rock.

Age had not enfeebled our grandmother like others of her years, though it had sucked the flesh from her skeleton and hunched her shoulders and spine. Her cheekbones were knives beneath leather, her eyes embers in sunken pits. Her hair – currently up in a dated style resembling a stunted peacock tail – was black save for a vicious streak of white to one side of her crown.

‘Stand up straight, the pair of you,’ she said.

You first, Grandmother, I thought.

Her cane moved, swift and sudden, and I flinched – for a second, I genuinely panicked that she could read my mind – yet it did not hit me; it tapped Slow Thezda’s right monocle. A tap, yes, but it must have pained the piercings that held the silver lens in place.

‘You’re a dullard as well as half-blind,’ Grandmother told her. ‘Make sure the twins don’t dally in future.’

‘I will, sir,’ Thezda said. ‘Apologies, sir.’

‘You had better be more astute when you guard me tomorrow.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Grandmother turned her attention to Kyran and me.

‘Comport yourself when you step outside,’ she told Kyran. ‘None of your gesticulations.’ She turned to me. ‘Try not to molest every female creature in the street. At least until the parade has passed, eh?’

I said nothing, my face a rigid blank like the mask hanging from my neck.

With brass-clawed fingers she lifted Kyran’s from his chest and inspected it.

‘The Final Countenance,’ she said. The flint vanished from her eyes and a softness, of a kind, replaced it. No: an awe. ‘The Blood passes through us, children. It has passed through me and it has passed through your parents.’ Her breeding talk. Neither I nor my brother had enthusiasm for breeding, indeed we feared our birth-ordained purpose. No mate selected for us could ever please our tastes. ‘This is your generation’s time,’ Grandmother reminded us. ‘A tiny increment on the climb to perfection, but vital. The Festival of Youth is for you, so that you might appreciate these truths.’

‘A highblood must reach for perfection in all things,’ Kyran said, repeating the old adage, ‘or fall.’

‘Good, good,’ Grandmother purred, and she let the mask rest on Kyran’s chest once more. ‘Let the family Rosho be a lesson.’ She gestured at the threshold to the street behind her with her cane.

‘We will savour this particular Rosho’s humiliation,’ Kyran said. ‘When he passes before us.’ He grinned.

‘Idiot,’ Grandmother said. ‘Savouring humiliation is for the masses. Fodder for stunted tastes.’

‘We were just talking about that,’ I said. Grandmother didn’t look at me, but I continued regardless. ‘Kyran believes the Roshos are continually spared because humiliation is crueller than death whereas I…’ I searched for the words that would gain her approval or, failing that, lessen her scorn.

‘Dear sister believes,’ Kyran cut in, ‘we spare the Roshos because we’re all too soft.’

‘In this modern age,’ I added quickly, hoping to assuage Grandmother’s traditionalism. I always hated the way I tried to please her, yet there it was again. A survival instinct perhaps.

‘You’re both wrong,’ Grandmother said. Surprisingly, there was no venom in her words. ‘But the day you finally comprehend why we let the Roshos live will be the day you’re fit to rule the family Cal’Adra.’ She leaned in a little. ‘It is a truth best not dangled before the lower-blooded mob. And the charade of public humiliation does much to hide it.’

‘Yet another mask,’ I noted.

Grandmother glared at me and for a moment I thought I would meet her cane. Instead, she turned around and headed for the double doors that led to the street.

‘The Shame Parade approaches,’ she said aloud to the hall. ‘Take up your countenance.’

*   *   *

We stepped out onto the stairs of our tower and were instantly noticed. The modest crowd were young and of the higher castes, Cals and Sils and Marns, those of a blood permitted to wear masks of the Final Countenance. They waved at us, each a perfect metallic face, silver and brass and bereft of expression.

My vision limited by the eyeholes, I turned to look at my brother. He was waving a hand high in the air, languid as a willow branch, his mask sparkling from the lunar glare of the many moontiles festooning the tops of posts along the street. Corso city turned silver and black at night, illuminated by those tiny clay replicas of the moon.

Grandmother’s bejewelled hand was upon Kyran’s shoulder. I felt nothing on mine. I supposed her other hand had to grip her cane. Well, I gave it no mind. I didn’t want that bitch’s claws on me anyway.

‘Go on, children,’ I heard her say. ‘This is your evening.’

We made our way down the shallow stairs toward the crowd, which by now had turned its attentions back on itself and the street. Two servants in animal masks approached carrying platters, a pincer movement of refreshments and unctuous bowing. To Kyran’s left came a trout mask with drinks, to my right a fawn holding a plate of wild olives. I popped a few in my mouth and took a bowl of wine.

I turned to my brother. ‘You’ve memorised your poem?’ I asked. After the Shame Parade would come the purification of several poetry contests and Kyran had entered the elegy.

‘Yes,’ he said over the crowd’s chatter. ‘And should I forget a line tonight I dare say I’ll spin something better in the moment.’

I dared say he would. The trait I most admired in my brother was his confidence, though I never told him so. Whenever Kyran set out to accomplish something in life, life would step back and demur.

‘You’ll win the prize,’ I told him. I patted his forearm. ‘This is your year, Ran-ran.’

His head tilted in such a way I knew it to be one of his smiles. No mask could ever hide it.

The fawn-faced servant still lingered at my right, her platter at my disposal. Her hair was in a single tight braid that ran down her back and did nothing to hide the fact it was as red as autumn leaves. One of the hinterforest folk, then, or a very recent descendent. Even the lowbloods of my city had bred out scarlet locks.

‘Enough,’ I said to her and waved her away. For a second she remained and I almost slapped her. But she turned and left.

What terrible service. The knave should have known to scuttle off as soon as I’d taken from her platter. But I didn’t let it bruise my evening.

I studied the women in our crowd, their smooth shoulders and elegant backs, their necks exposed by the fashion for high hair. One noticed me notice. She caught her friend’s attention – a delicate waif with unusual and much-prized silver locks – and the two of them looked me up and down. A pity I could not see their faces beneath their masks. I rested my hand upon my pommel once more, inclined my head toward them and then looked elsewhere among the crowd. They knew who I was. Plenty of time tonight. Kyran had his pursuits, and I had mine.

Drums echoed across the walls of the tower and the buildings along the curving street. The crowd settled into a silence peppered with hushed words.

We saw the Obsidians first, the Explainers’ lowblood guards with their greatclubs and frightening skull masks, marching in three lines. Behind them were drummers with pennants strapped to their backs, black flags with white glyphs upon them: ‘sickness’, ‘ugliness’, ‘deformity’, ‘weakness’.

The crowd booed. We booed louder when the troupe of acrogoyles danced and cavorted and somersaulted past us. These dancers portrayed the chaos our species had risen from and would fall back into if we ever diverted from the path to final perfection. It felt good to yell at their clay faces, their warty and lumpen masks full of cowardice and idiocy. The parade was a once-in-a-year release, something you felt in your chest that was all the more vital because everybody around you felt it too. We were one, a new generation: the new blood, proud and together.

Last came the palanquin, carried by sixteen condemned criminals, and our screaming filled the street to the stars above. Atop the palanquin’s cushions sat a thing like a gigantic scaly pear with legs and arms. It was a suit of armour, composed of hundreds of pieces of painted wood in horizontal segments that encased a padding fashioned to resemble obesity. The armour had a porcelain face of repellent aspect, a face that could glean no pity in this world save the strangling hands of any mother that bore it. Inside this armour was the young Rosho, offered up by his family for the yearly abuse.

The abomination suit. It, the palanquin it squatted on, and the criminals who carried it were already smeared with rotten fruit and shit, for they had already passed through several public squares full of Corso’s lowbloods. The mob never missed their once-a-year opportunity to curse and defile a highblood.

Now he passed a tower of his once-contemporaries, the Rosho inside that armour would soon know a vitriol far more personal. He was no longer Cal, no longer highblood – today he wasn’t even commrach. He was nothing but a portrait of abomination, that monstrous result of commrach and human congress. A caliban, to use the human word, for even those beasts upon the mainland understood the wrongness of it.

I threw my wine bowl, no care for where it landed, and screeched; I was too focused on that plump and callow porcelain face. Rosho idiocy had led to my mother’s death and human thuggery had supplied it. This blend of commrach and human was a fetish of both my mother’s killers. And my hatred was right. The Explainers and my city and everything our Isle’s civilisation stood for made it so.

My brother screamed with me. I saw the silver-haired girl I’d just admired scream too. She swore and threw stones, cursed Rosho through her elegant mask of silver. More drums, more marching, more yells, our screaming the howl of some vast and unseen creature.

I don’t know why I stopped. The loathing just went out of me or, at least, out of me swifter than any of my contemporaries. I’d even less reason to turn around. Yet I did.

The fawn-girl, that red-haired servant, was looking at me. Stood there some fifteen feet away, her plate of olives still in hand.

I stared open-mouthed, though I imagine my mask obscured the fact. The sheer temerity…

The servant took an olive from her plate and, slipping her fingers beneath her mask, popped it in her mouth. She stared at me a second longer and then, quite casually, walked away. To wherever servants of my family’s tower went.

I laughed. I could do nothing else. Bemused, I returned to the crowd and its abuse.

3

THE MAIN, West Hosshire, March 881

The barn stank of cowshit. We were all sat in the hayloft so as to avoid the stink’s origins below. I ran my finger along the flat of my rapier, felt myself pouring into its steel. One has to feel what the blade wants, sense its potential, its dream of sharpness. The moonlight from a hole in the roof caught each silver glyph along its yard of sleek black metal.

‘That’s a kind of prayer, in’t it?’ Ned, sitting and shivering beside me, said. ‘Touching it like that.’

‘Practicality, not prayer,’ I told him. I kept my eye to my work. ‘My people’s touch brings vitality, improves all made things.’

‘Craft magic.’

‘I suppose. We call it imbuing.’ I snorted. ‘Prayer? We have no god upon our Isle. Does that scare you, Ned?’ I rather enjoyed scaring him, the poor boy. He knew nothing of the world.

He looked about the barn, his breath misting in the April night.

‘No. Just… dun’t make sense.’

I was tempted to mention the devil, to see the fright in Ned’s eyes. The humans’ church insisted the devil was the defiant enemy of their omnipotent lord of all creation, a premise that made no sense even on its own terms. But the devil of peasant folk like Ned was different to that of altar carvings and dusty parchment. More visceral, primeval, a half-beast lurking in nature’s shadows: forests, barrows. Old barns. I recalled the fertility doll back in the inn. It had possessed goat legs, had it not? Perhaps I should have taken it and left it in Ned’s bag or some such sport. Fools like him saw the ‘Dark One’ in just about anything. Cruel, but it might have passed an hour.

‘Better have penny,’ Illsa the roadwoman was saying to Shortleg. He was mounting her like a sow somewhere behind Ned, hard against a boarded-up window at the rear of the hayloft. Mercifully in the gloom.

‘I got penny,’ Shortleg said. He grumbled as he penetrated her. ‘Two hundred fucking pip’strells today, love.’

‘Show some.’

‘Fucking now? Buried under cowshit downstairs yer daft twat.’ He grunted. ‘Saw us bury it.’

Shortleg’s idea, that – a good one for once. Hide the loot, return some time thereafter. Six hundred pipistrells. Another good idea would be to split up and meet in Hoxham later. Yet no one had suggested it. No one trusted anyone else not to run back within minutes and start digging. None of us were in a rush to sleep either. We were pennyblades; we knew our kind.

‘Pull out ’fore yer spill,’ fat Illsa told Shortleg. ‘I mean it this time.’

I looked down at my sword again. I hated Illsa, she me. If not for the boys she’d joyfully report my carnal ‘devilry’ to the Church, quick as hares. My own fault. I’d got shit-faced under the stars when we first met, offered tuppenny for her hand, and not in the matrimonial sense. She’d screamed til’ Shortleg slapped her.

‘Never known a point sharper,’ Ned said. I hoped he meant my sword. ‘Can it pierce mail, Kyra?’

‘As through loaf,’ I answered. ‘Well… tough loaf. All Isle blades can.’

‘Why’d you leave? Wish you’d tell us.’

I gritted my teeth, sniffed. I put my rapier back in its scabbard and lifted my blanket around my shoulders.

‘Why’d you leave your home?’ I asked Ned.

‘Mottlesthorpe? Dunno. Got sick of threshing hay.’

‘Then my reason is exactly your reason. Minus the hay.’

He laughed and it became a shiver. I looked at him and chuckled too.

‘You’re a… good man, Ned. A fine bow.’

Shortleg and Illsa shuffled in the dark, finding their rhythm, shambling and snorting like the placid cattle below us. A handful of them, wretchedly thin.

‘What’ll you do with your share, Ned?’ I asked.

He looked at me. A strange look, as if he were readying to shoot a man.

‘Dunno,’ he said.

‘The finest tailor for me. Then a finer whore to tear it all off.’ I wiggled my eyebrows and grinned my sharp grin. ‘Eh?’

He didn’t smile. He looked about the barn again. Something was scaring him. The rope, likely. Thoughts of the gibbet.

‘Ooh, that’s it,’ Shortleg muttered. ‘Fuckin’ magic.’

Illsa didn’t moan. Roadwomen weren’t expected to; they just lived off the pennyblades and the pennyblades lived off everyone’s misery. Hard times here on the Main. A whole generation of men who knew no trade save death. Forty years of war had seen to that. The Church had brought peace some four years before I arrived on the mainland. Yet a swift peace leaves folk with swords and no work. A pennyblade summer.

‘Kyra,’ Ned said.

‘What?’

‘Got summat. To give you.’

‘Another cold?’ I joked. When I saw his face was serious as plague, I ceased smiling. ‘What?’

He pulled something acorn-sized out of his jacket. I hoped it was an acorn because I was famished and we’d only bread, and bread gives our kind the shits. But no: a tiny oak circle. A ring. He passed it me.

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Is this what you’ve been carving?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. He stroked his hair.

I studied it under the moonlight. I could make out patterns, the same as the glyphs on my rapier.

‘This is beautiful, Ned,’ I said. It really was.

‘Ain’t finished yet,’ he said. ‘But… now we’ve money I thought…’

‘You’d make a few? Sell them?’

‘No.’ He met my eyes. ‘Kyra Cal’Adra… please, be me wife. I beg yer.’

Silence. Nothing but the schmeck-schmeck-schmeck of Shortleg’s accelerating enthusiasm.

Illsa grunted. ‘I’m not a bloody anvil,’ she told him.

I laughed. The idea of it, the whole moment, everything – the absurdity of this new low I’d reached. The daughter of Cal’Adra, the twelfth family, encircled by rutting morons, an illiterate boy her suitor. I’d become everything Grandmother predicted and I laughed to elude a stirring fury.

‘Well?’ Ned asked.

I shook my head. ‘Oh, Edward. I chase the girls, remember? I’d have thought I’d made that clear.’

‘Yeah, but… that’s just playing, havin’ fun and that. Everyone settles. And I wouldn’t mind. You could keep chasing. I wouldn’t mind, Kyra. I wouldn’t.’

Idiot. ‘I’m touched, Ned. But we’re not even the same beasts.’

‘Hearts are the same. I love you, Kyra.’ The last part came out a squeak.

‘You don’t. It’s just—’

‘Got it planned. There’s this pub back home, just outside Mottlesthorpe. We could buy it with our share. Stop the penny-life. I’d make you a daisy chain every day o’ spring. Winters by hearth, children beside—’

I threw his ring across the barn. It landed in the darkness. In the shit.

‘Don’t say it,’ I barked. I must have looked a monster, but I couldn’t hold back. ‘I don’t birth calibans, peasant. If you knew anything about me, about commrach, you’d know that.’

Ned’s puppy eyes watered. His lips shook.

I wouldn’t weaken. ‘And I certainly won’t pour ales in fucking Mottlesthorpe.’

Ned whimpered, tears falling.

Best like this, I told myself; the kindest blade is the swiftest. One stab. Over. Besides, he’d slurred my blood. The Blood entire.

Shortleg groaned.

‘Bastard!’ Illsa shouted. ‘I said dun’t spill in me!’

Shortleg laughed. ‘Guess you’re just too pretty, eh?’

‘Bastard!’

Shortleg chuckled. Like an idiot, I looked over to see him pulling his trousers up. I got an eyeful of the base of his still-engorged cock, the outline of its tip pushing against his trousers. Shortleg saw that I saw. He grinned and winked at me.

‘I need a shit,’ he announced to the barn. He buckled up and walked by me and Ned.

‘Twat,’ Illsa muttered. She started looking through her satchel for her vinegar and cloth.

Ordinarily I would have laughed at her, but shame was clawing at me, demanding payment for anger’s excess.

‘I’m sorry, Ned.’

He kept sobbing.

‘I’ll search for the ring come morning,’ I said. ‘You can give it… You’ll find a nice girl. You’re a… you’re a handsome lad, Ned.’

‘Y’broke me heart,’ he said, between squeaks and snot.

I heard Shortleg unlock the barn door and leave. Uncharacteristically polite, I thought, taking his shit outside.

‘Don’t hate yourself, Edward,’ I said. ‘It’s just me.’

Illsa laughed. ‘Lovebiiiiirds.’

‘Shut it, twat,’ I snapped.

Illsa gave me a filthy look.

‘She hurt you, Ned?’ she said.

Ned put his head in his hands and his shoulders juddered.

‘Shouldn’t chase pixie arse, Ned,’ she said. ‘They’ve no soul. Plain evil they are.’

I scowled at her.

She grinned at me. ‘Ned, want me to suck it better? Gi’yit free.’

Ned roared with tears.

‘Here, Neddy,’ she cooed, still looking at me. ‘Close your eyes and you can pretend I’m her.’

I leapt up. Oh, I’d give Illsa the back of my hand, like human men did.

Smoke. I smelled smoke.

I grabbed my belt with my sword and buckled myself.

‘I’m going out,’ I said.

‘Yeah, fuck off,’ Illsa said. ‘Mardy twat.’

I clambered down the ladder, stepped over cow pats. The gap between the barn’s doors shone orange. I ran at the doors and kicked. Barricaded. I felt an oven’s heat against my face, heard flames snap and crackle.

Terror filled me. Not like this – a blade, an arrow. Not this.

Fingers of smoke poured in under the barn door. I turned and clambered up the ladder as fast as water runs down.

‘Barn’s on fire,’ I said. ‘Doors locked.’

‘Y’what?’ Illsa said.

Ned looked at me dumbly, his mouth an O .

There was a hand-thin window to the front of the hayloft, same side as the doors. I ran to it, climbing over straw.

The flames beneath the window blinded me with their glow. I squinted, trying to see past the rising embers. I could see figures, twenty or more.

Monsters. Dead men. Bodies with rotting faces, lit by the burning hay surrounding our barn.

I blinked. No – they wore masks. Masks just like the little figurine back in the cellar. But not yarn, rope. Rope bound tightly to their faces, with ragged holes for their eyes and mouths.

One of the ropefaces wore the innkeep’s breeches. Blood, what was this?

I ducked from the window before any could see me.

Ned and Illsa were already on their feet.

‘Men out there,’ I said. ‘It’s their fire.’

‘Fuck,’ Ned said. In the moonlight his eyes were red and wide.

There was the hole in the roof above, a cool blackness peppered with stars. I was nimble, could leap high. It wasn’t that high. I’d just fall, break my ankles in the cowshit below.

‘Over there,’ I told the others. I pointed at the boarded-up window where Illsa and Shortleg had swived, the opposite side of the barn to our murderers. ‘Get Shortleg’s axe.’

‘S’not here,’ Illsa said. She looked as if her heart had broken like Ned’s. ‘Bastard took it with him. Planned it! He told us to sleep here. Burn us! Take the pip’strells his self.’

I couldn’t process that. They must have killed Shortleg, had to have. Shortleg was loyal.

‘A lever then,’ I said, words ahead of my thoughts. ‘Ned, your sword!’

Ned nodded, speechless.

We set to pulling planks from the window, Ned levering with his blade, me pulling back the wood. The cold night outside beckoned.

My arms ached and I had splinters in my palm. The smoke was rising, tainting the air. Down below, the slumbering cows stirred.

‘Fucking bastard,’ I heard Illsa say. ‘Spilled in me and killed me, he has. Spilled and killed.’

We prised three boards off.

‘Enough,’ I said. There was hay below, smouldering, though nothing like the fire on the other side of the barn. A soft landing at least, and there was no one out there that side of the building. I grabbed Ned’s and my bags and threw them out the window, into the darkness beyond the flames, the burning stink in my nostrils.

‘Go, Ned.’

‘Shit,’ he muttered. He pushed himself up by his arms and fell through. Brave, Ned, once he’d set himself to something. He hit the hay, rolled and got up. He didn’t catch fire. He picked up the bags and waited.

‘Illsa, jump,’ I said. Behind her, the barn’s planks had turned to black silhouettes in an orange glow. It was happening so damned quickly.

She took two steps toward the window, then froze.

‘Can’t,’ she said. She coughed. ‘I can’t.’

‘Illsa, I cannot throw your fat arse.’ I spat out acrid phlegm. ‘Jump!’

‘Please…’ Her face began to crease. She hugged me. ‘S’fire. I…Please…’

For the first time, she looked truly, utterly beautiful. I felt like a hero in some tale, the princess trembling in his arms. But, more than that, profoundly more, I saw Illsa, once so precious. Someone’s daughter.

I threw her to the floor and turned toward the window behind me. I grabbed the windowsill, climbed, readied to leap.

A hand grabbed my ankle. Illsa. I tripped, falling forward into the burning night.

The drop and then the flames. A snap of agony in my right hand, my sword hand. My ribs. More pain: the fire. I rolled, got up, stumbled from the burning hay, embers spinning about me in the dark.

Hands on me. Ned, slapping out flames.

‘Where’s Illsa?’ he said.

My hand hummed with pain; my whole right side throbbed. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Illsa!’ he shouted at the window above us.

‘We’ve seconds, Ned.’

He knew what I meant. They’d have heard us by now.

‘She’s looking through the window,’ Ned said.